ACE shuts down massive hacker website after locating its owner in remote Peru *TorrentFreak

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As part of its global anti-piracy mission, the Coalition for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE) is trying to shut down Pelisplushd.net, a massive piracy streaming site with nearly 70 million visits per month. After tracking down its operator in remote rural Peru, the anti-piracy group said the site no longer existed.

In October 2021, TorrentFreak learned that the Motion Picture Association and its anti-piracy partner, the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment, had taken an interest in one of the world’s most popular pirate streaming sites.

In a DMCA subpoena filed with a California court, MPA/ACE asked Cloudflare to turn over all information on several pirate platforms including movies, TV shows, and anime streaming site Pelisplushd.net.

The site wasn’t particularly well known in English-speaking regions, but in Latin America, its status as a behemoth was unchallenged – 58 million visits per month according to Similar Web data. In the following months, the site grew with millions more visitors, but in the third week of March, local residents reported problems accessing the site. We now know why.

ACE claims victory on Pelisplushd.net

In a statement published Wednesday, ACE officially announced that it was behind the closure of Pelisplushd.net. The anti-piracy group described the platform as the second largest Spanish-language “rogue site” in the entire Latin American region with 383.5 million visits in the past six months and nearly 75 million visits in February 2022.

In Mexico alone, the site had more visitors than hbomax.com, disneyplus.com, and primevideo.com, which is an obvious problem for those platforms that are all ACE members.

“This is a huge win for the ACE team in Latin America as we work to protect the legitimate digital ecosystem across the region,” said Jan Van Vouren, Executive Vice President and Head of Global Content Protection for the Motion Picture Association.

“The successful action against the operator of Pelisplushd.net was only possible due to the evidence we gathered from previous operations conducted in other countries in Latin America.

“This speaks volumes about ACE’s ability to crack current situations using years of intelligence gathered in the past and highlights the global and strategic approach that defines our businesses around the world.”

Where was the site operator?

The name of Pelisplushd’s operator has yet to be revealed, but ACE revealed that after a positive identification, the anti-piracy group tracked it down to “remote Peruvian countryside.”

It happened in March and shortly after, ACE says the operator agreed to hand over its domains. As far as we can tell the main domain of Pelisplushd.net is not yet completely in the hands of ACE/MPA but the full transfer is likely to take place later.

Meanwhile, ACE members including Netflix continue to send Google DMCA takedown notices, even after the platform’s demise.

Overall, 175 copyright holders have filed similar takedown notices against the Pelisplushd.net domain, indicating that the ACE takedown domain will be welcomed far beyond its regular members.

The domain was also mentioned in a recent submission to the European Commission’s “Counterfeiting and Piracy Watch List” by the MPA but after it is closed, this domain is likely to be delisted.

However, many other Pelisplus-branded sites still exist, and collectively they deserve tens of millions of views per month. They include Pelisplushd.to, a domain that appears to have increased its traffic by more than 500% in the past month.