Inflating the number of peers on a torrent?

**kokopelli** · 15.09.09, 15:41

Hey all,

My search on google led me to this forum. Awesome place this for a torrent freak!

I was looking for a tool that can report an inflated number of seeds/leeches to a tracker thus inflating the peer count and making it look lik a popular torrent.

Basically I'm looking to promote some of my stuff on open public trackers so bans etc is not a problem. All I need is for a lot of people to download my uploads so that my torrent gets a lot of traffic. One way of doing this is to ensure that my torrent looks popular with lots of peers.

I know theres a way of reporting fake peers to the tracker (something lik repeated GET requests to a tracker?) but I'm not sure how it is done. I'm on coder and have been hunting for such a script/tool for a long time now. I know that it exists and was wondering if any of you know how to accomplish this?

Would be a great help if someone can point me in the right direction.

Thanks!

**alpacino** · 15.09.09, 16:33

I don't think this is really possible, and hammering a tracker with lots of announces can get you in trouble in no time.

**anon** · 15.09.09, 16:40

It's as possible as before. Those values are stored server-side. There's a "seed inflator" in the leaked MD source code, but:

Originally Posted by anon

... it was MediaDefender (or any other anti-P2P group) using their BTSeedInflator (source code is in the MD leak) to "increase" the amount of "seeders" in the swarm sky-high. (Seeing this, people jumped on the torrent and increased the amount of leechers as well.)

MD could achieve this because they had their (by then) private tool, and 9Gbit connections. In theory you could do it, but you'd saturate your bandwidth in the process.

It's also possible that the torrents you saw were hosted at fake trackers, where it takes anti-P2Pers just a database edit to report thousands of seeders.

Now, if you hosted your own tracker you could manipulate stats at will, but that's more difficult than just using a public announce URL.

**kokopelli** · 08.10.09, 06:24

guys, thanks for your replies.

i know im bumping up a real old thread but heres something:

check out this torrent here: (Link removed by sbi staff. No illegal contents!)

its got only one tracker and that is a well known public tracker (http://tracker.publicbt.com:80/announce
).

Clearly it is a stupid fake but the torrent statistics are interesting. It shows over 4000 seeds which is clearly faked.

How are they doing this? There must be a way....

**MoS** · 08.10.09, 07:55

Seeders are 106 only, no thousands .
What makes you think they are faking ? and what is the profit they are getting if they do ?

**thecoolest** · 08.10.09, 09:03

they r just adding all the public trackers there so they can get more speed & can hit & run..but it wont happen some public trackers only sent data when u download torrent from their sites..

**anon** · 08.10.09, 12:26

The site only shows 106 seeders and 108 leechers to me - and when I load it in uTorrent, that's only 1S/3L.

It shows over 4000 seeds which is clearly faked.

How are they doing this? There must be a way....

For the tracker it's really easy. When some scrapes, tell him the seeder count is the real one + 4000. Same goes for normal announces.

Originally Posted by MoS

... faking ? and what is the profit they are getting if they do ?

If it's a bad torrent designed to get your IP or something else, faking the seeder count will make more people jump on it believing it's well-seeded, inflating its popularity even more.

**kokopelli** · 09.10.09, 08:27

Originally Posted by anon

The site only shows 106 seeders and 108 leechers to me - and when I load it in uTorrent, that's only 1S/3L.

I guess the faking tends to come down gradually with time. When I loaded the site it was showing 4k seeds and I suppose the next time the torrent updates on the site it will be showing zero which is the actual number.

Originally Posted by anon

For the tracker it's really easy. When some scrapes, tell him the seeder count is the real one + 4000. Same goes for normal announces.

you mean if you own the tracker, its real easy? if yes then im looking for a way to spoof public trackers only...

Originally Posted by anon

If it's a bad torrent designed to get your IP or something else, faking the seeder count will make more people jump on it believing it's well-seeded, inflating its popularity even more.

yeah...i believe that torrent is a fake prolly uploaded by some anti p2p losers.

Thanks so much for your time guys. appreciate it.

**anon** · 09.10.09, 12:39

Originally Posted by kokopelli

you mean if you own the tracker, its real easy?

Yes, you'll only have to edit announce.php or scrape.php to add 4000 to the number of seeders that's sent.

But you don't own the tracker, it's a pretty much impossible feat. You could start your own and make that change, but it'd require a lot of effort and the .torrent file for what you want to forge the S/L counts won't get your tracker's URL magically added to it. And even if it did, experienced torrenters know fake trackers are commonplace and thus will remove it when adding the torrent.

**cheatos** · 09.10.09, 22:24

how about using ratiomaster with 100% completion on different IPs

?

400Posts ^^, a little more to reach anon

**anon** · 09.10.09, 22:25

Originally Posted by cheatos

how about using ratiomaster with 100% completion on different IPs

?

The tracker identifies peers via the peer_id. You'll need at least 4000 RM instances

**cheatos** · 09.10.09, 22:31

my bad i thought on public trackers it was done via IPs.

another suggestion is that it can be done using VisualBasic/C# by sending 4000 http request to the tracker which generates a peerID everytime by using a loop

**anon** · 09.10.09, 22:32

That would work - but imagine the bandwidth usage, specially since you'll need to send them every 30-45 minutes.

**cheatos** · 09.10.09, 22:36

yes your right about the usage
however this is the only solution i can think of

I know theres a way of reporting fake peers to the tracker (something lik repeated GET requests to a tracker?) but I'm not sure how it is done. I'm on coder and have been hunting for such a script/tool for a long time now. I know that it exists and was wondering if any of you know how to accomplish this?

if you liked the idea i can make the code for you.