French Police Dismantle Operation Behind the Already Defunct YggTorrent

France's Gendarmerie nationale announced that it dismantled the organization behind YggTorrent, France's largest torrent site. Twelve people have been arrested on charges including money laundering. The site itself, however, was already destroyed months ago by a hacker who leaked its data and drained its crypto wallets. Meanwhile, the arrests are sending shockwaves through the wider French piracy scene.

YggTorrent was France’s largest torrent community, with more than 10 million registered members when it shut down in March following a major hack.

The hacker, known as Gr0lum, breached the site’s infrastructure, exfiltrated 19 GB of data, drained its crypto wallets, and wiped its servers.

That proved to be too much to come back from and YggTorrent decided to throw in the towel instead. In many cases, that would be the end of the story. However, the French Gendarmerie nationale had other plans in the works.

Twelve YggTorrent Arrests

This week, the police announced that it dismantled ‘the structure’ behind YggTorrent. This wording is carefully chosen and avoids taking direct credit for the site’s shutdown, which took place months earlier.

The police operation was conducted by the UNCyber unit from the Montpellier Section de Recherches, under the direction of the JIRS and JUNALCO in Paris. Twelve people have been arrested and put under investigation.

The press release suggests that not all reported arrests are recent, noting that they were carried out since late 2023. The twelve people are suspected of organized copyright infringement (contrefaçon), money laundering, and operating a platform facilitating illegal transactions.

In French legal terms, the suspects have been placed under formal judicial investigation (mise en examen), which signals that prosecutors believe there is serious evidence of criminal involvement.

The investigation was initiated following complaints from SACEM, ALPA, and the French Video Publishing Union. SACEM’s enforcement interest in YggTorrent dates back to at least 2018, when one of its complaints forced the site to abandon its .com domain.

The scale of YggTorrent’s operation may explain the severity of the charges. According to data in the Gr0lum leak, the site generated an estimated €8.5 million in revenue in 2025, allegedly routing payments through dozens of fake e-commerce storefronts to disguise transactions from payment processors including PayPal and Stripe.

‘Dismantling The Site’?

The police note that searches across France uncovered crypto-assets linked to the site’s revenues and approximately €45,000 in computer equipment.

These details were proudly shared on social media too, with a notable exaggeration.

The Gendarmerie’s tweet
 

As shown above, the French police claim to have dismantled the “#YGGTORRENT download site”, which is not exactly true. The site itself has been offline for months, after all, and was directly linked to the hack.

The police press release does not mention the hack at all. Their investigation already started years earlier, but it is possible that the leaked information may have been useful as added intelligence.

When YggTorrent’s hacker came forward in March, they explicitly noted that the data could be “of interest to law enforcement.”

Wider Fallout

The arrests appear to have triggered a wave of closures across France’s broader warez community.

According to KultureGeek, the former leaders of release groups Forward (FW) and TFA, both specializing in WEB-DL rips of streaming content, have been arrested, along with a community member known as Fervex. Several former YggTorrent moderators were also detained.

Forward, which was responsible for an estimated 35,000 torrents before being banned from YggTorrent during the Turbo Mode controversy last December, confirmed its permanent closure. Predb FR, a release indexer, shut down. Nexum, a private tracker, was destroyed by its own operator as a precaution, while Usenet indexer UNFR also went dark.

Whether the FW and TFA arrests are part of the Gendarmerie’s twelve or whether they are part of a separate investigation remains unclear. Other community reports on Reddit and elsewhere could not be immediately verified either, but it is clear that the French piracy scene is in turmoil.

For now, the investigation remains ongoing, and the Gendarmerie has not ruled out further arrests.

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post. Feedback welcome.

Posted Friday 3 July 2026 at 5:19 pm AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of June) 2,475

RIP Matrix