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Popular pirate streaming site Vumoo.to was taken down by its operator this weekend, in response to enforcement action by anti-piracy group ACE. With more than 12 million monthly visits, Vumoo was one of the more popular piracy portals. The site was presumably being operated from Vietnam, where many of the largest pirate sites and services still reside today.

The Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE) is the world’s most active anti-piracy coalition, initiating and assisting enforcement efforts around the world.

Most anti-piracy actions are focused on streaming sites and services, many of which are located in or operated from Vietnam.

ACE previously visited Vietnam and met with government officials to explore potential solutions to address the problem. However, aside from some incidental successes, the problem persists.

Earlier this year, rightsholders flagged the Asian country as a ‘haven’ for pirate sites. In a letter to the US Trade Representative, IIPA pointed out several problematic sites and services, including Fmovies, AniWave, 123movies, BestBuyIPTV, 2embed, and Y2mate.

Vumoo.to Takedown

The above-mentioned sites remain online at the time of writing, but ACE did book a new success this week by taking the popular pirate streaming site Vumoo.to offline.

On Sunday, the nameservers of Vumoo.to were updated to ns3.films.org and ns4.films.org, which typically signals ACE taking control. And indeed, the group confirmed to TorrentFreak that Vumoo.to is currently offline following ACE action in Vietnam.

Jan van Voorn, MPA’s Chief of Global Content Protection and head of ACE, says the takedown was not assisted by third parties such as domain registries or registrars. ACE worked directly with the operator of the site, who presumably took it offline voluntarily.

Vumoo.to first came online in 2016 and built a large audience in the years that followed. With well over 12 million monthly visits, the streaming portal was a sizable target and a key one for ACE.

Perpetual Crackdown?

How the anti-piracy group tracked down Vumoo’s operator isn’t mentioned, but ACE has been gathering information for years. Through U.S. courts, the group previously obtained DMCA subpoenas requiring the Tonic domain registry and Cloudflare to share all useful info they have on the site.

Pirate sites often use false information to register domains, so this information may have led to nothing. However, local connections and OSINT may ultimately have helped to pinpoint the site’s operator.

With the ‘takedown’ of Vumoo.to, ACE can chalk up yet another success but whether it will last remains to be seen. Previous Vietnamese actions against sites such as Zoro.to and 2embed had mixed results, as these sites soon came back ‘under new management‘ or in ‘cloned’ versions.