French police just dismantled the operation behind YggTorrent, arresting 12 people tied to the country’s largest torrent site months after it had already gone dark.
YggTorrent was France’s biggest torrent community, with more than 10 million registered members before it collapsed. It vanished in March after a hacker known as Gr0lum breached the site, stole 19GB of data, and drained its crypto wallets, a takedown we covered when YggTorrent shut down.
The arrests show the torrent website never really escaped the law. Investigators had been building the case since late 2023, long before the hack finished the job.
Details of the YggTorrent Takedown
The operation was run by the UNCYBER cyber unit of the Montpellier Section de Recherches, directed by prosecutors from JIRS and JUNALCO in Paris.
According to reports, the 12 suspects included former YggTorrent moderators and operators, plus the leaders of the release groups Forward (FW) and TFA, which specialized in ripping WEB-DL streaming content. A well-known community member called Fervex was also swept up.
The suspects face charges of organized copyright infringement, money laundering, and running a platform built for illegal transactions. Investigators say the site pulled in roughly €8.5 million in 2025 alone.
Police seized crypto tied to the site’s revenue along with about €45,000 in computer equipment. The case started years ago with complaints from French rightsholder groups SACEM and ALPA, which had chased YggTorrent since at least 2018.
The fallout hit fast across the French scene. As the FW team announced their own goodbye: “La fin définitive de la team FW aujourd’hui.”
Hide Your Digital Fingerprint
After quick research we found the ripple effect went well past one crew, with indexers like Predb FR, the Nexum tracker, and the UNFR usenet service all going quiet as other groups scaled back to avoid the same fate.
Final Thoughts from Troy
Here’s the part worth remembering. YggTorrent already died back in March when a hacker drained its money. The arrests still happened anyway, because police had been working the case quietly since 2023.
The site had 10 million members and made €8.5 million a year, but none of that protected the people who ran it. Now the rest of the scene is scared, and other torrent groups are shutting down to avoid the same knock on the door.
France takes this seriously too. One man already got a five-year prison sentence just for torrenting. If you still download files from a torrent site, the risk is real, and it doesn’t go away when a site disappears.
For more details on this story, refer to the reports from French media and TorrentFreak.
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