Fake seeders

[poweromania]

occasionally on thepiratebay.org/browse/401 you will see dozens even hundreds of torrent with a crazy amount of seeders and leechers. Is clearly they are fake but how do they do it? I heard some people have their one torrent tracker (and modify seeders and leecher) and since tbp don't have his own tracker i guess it believes everything you throw at him.

[anon]

I just opened the first ten pages of that, and the amounts of seeders and leechers on all torrents seemed reasonable. Anyway, they can be faked, with enough knowledge and resources.

15586

[THC]

They seem fake to me. I guess those new uploaders are malware spreaders. Only download from VIP and Trusted uploaders (with colored skulls) on TPB.

Does TPB extract the peers number from the public trackers assigned to the torrent (publicbt, demonii, trackerfix etc.)? Or from the DHT and Peer exchange?

[anon]

Does TPB extract the peers number from the public trackers assigned to the torrent (publicbt, demonii, trackerfix etc.)? Or from the DHT and Peer exchange?

That's a good question, since both are possible (although DHT scraping is a bit more complex). I suggest uploading a dummy torrent with a single fake tracker that says it has 4287 seeders, then we'll know :smilie4: