Gay-Torrents Vanishes After Lawsuit, FlavaWorks Narrows Case from 325 to 39 Users * TorrentFreak

Gay-Torrents Vanishes After Lawsuit, FlavaWorks Narrows Case from 325 to 39 Users

FlavaWorks is an Illinois-based adult entertainment company specializing in content featuring Black and Latino men.

In late April, the company launched one of its largest legal campaigns, targeting the owner and administrators of private BitTorrent tracker Gay-Torrents.org.

The complaint, filed at the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, also listed a named uploader as a defendant, as well as 325 individual members identified only by their site usernames.

Flava has filed lawsuits against copyright infringers in the past, but this case stands out. Gay-Torrents.org has been a long-running private torrent tracker, and seeing hundreds of individual users being targeted directly is rather unprecedented.

Gay-Torrents Vanishes

Over the years, Flava has repeatedly signaled that it has its eyes set on the private torrent tracker. That didn’t seem to faze the operators. However, shortly after the complaint was filed, they took drastic action.

In early May, Gay-Torrents.org suddenly became unresponsive, and it still is today. The domain’s A records were simply deleted, presumably without the operators informing the tracker’s staff or users.

According to a post in a gay Reddit community, the operators did not inform the admins of the site either.

"I am in contact with one of them, and while I can’t say how I got this information they are completely in the dark too. Whatever happened, the owners didn’t inform either of them prior to shutting the site," the commenter said.

The Reddit comment

This exact Reddit thread wasn’t just read by former users of the private tracker. Flava was also reading along. This week, they filed an amended complaint where the same commenter is cited, to explain the tracker’s apparent disappearance to the court.

Amended Complaint: Operators Frustrate the Case

The amended complaint adds an entire section dedicated to the site’s disappearance. According to Flava, Gay-Torrents.org was taken offline intentionally, and that serves as an admission of guilt.

Flava quotes several messages from the Reddit thread, which suggest that the people running the site left without offering an explanation.

"These facts support the inference that the operator-tier Defendants undertook the shutdown to frustrate service of process, dissipate assets, destroy evidence, and otherwise evade the jurisdiction of this Court," Flava writes.

From the amended complaint

Flava argues these third-party Reddit comments show the operators acted unilaterally and without warning, behavior it says is consistent with an attempt to frustrate the case rather than an ordinary technical outage.

From 325 Users to 39

The most significant change in the amended complaint is a sharp reduction in the number of targeted users. The original complaint listed 325 "John Doe" members of the site. The amended version reduces that figure to just 39 users.

This reduction is the result of a change in strategy. Previously, members were selected on several alternative grounds, including VIP purchases, forum activity, and forensic-watermark matches. The 39 remaining defendants are now all included based on a single theory.

The complaint alleges that these users all had an account on a FlavaWorks-branded website using the same email address registered to their Gay-Torrents.org account. In doing so, they agreed to terms that include an Illinois forum-selection clause.

"The identity of the email address establishes the identity of the natural person," the complaint reads.

Exact Match

By matching the email addresses used on the tracker to those used on its own paid sites, Flava claims it can both unmask the anonymous users and bind them to an Illinois court through the contracts they previously accepted.

"Known" Tracker Registration Emails?

The complaint does not explain how Flava obtained the registration email addresses linked to the private, invite-only Gay-Torrents.org accounts in the first place. This information is typically only visible to the site’s admins.

Instead, Flava states only that the addresses are "known to Plaintiff" and matched against its own subscriber records. How it obtained the tracker’s internal registration data is left unmentioned.

Known to Plaintiff

We can only speculate, but this type of data can usually only be accessed through leaks or with help from a planted or compromised insider. Perhaps more detail will be uncovered as the case progresses.

Flava Seeks Domain Takeover

The amended complaint also expands the injunctive relief Flava seeks from the court. In addition to the asset freeze and records-preservation requests from the original complaint, the company now asks the court to direct domain registrar Tucows to lock the gay-torrents.org domain, preventing it from being transferred.

As part of a...