5 More Former OiNK Users Arrested

UK Police confirm that a total of five males aged 19-33yo and a 28yo female have been arrested and released on bail now been released on bail without charge.

The other day I mentioned how a former user of OiNK, the fabled and long shuttered music-oriented BitTorrent tracker site, was arrested by the UK's Cleveland Police for allegedly having uploaded a single pre-release album back in early 2007 while the site was still up and running.

Now it seems that he wasn't alone with news that a total of five males aged 19-33yo and a 28yo female have been arrested and released on bail. They too stand accused of uploading pre-release albums to OiNK.

All were detained "in relation to uploading pre-released music," said Cleveland Police.

The seizure of OiNK's site logs in "Operation Ark Royal" means that this might be the first of many arrests made against former users of the site.

"The illegal online distribution of music, particularly pre-release, is hugely damaging, and as OiNK was the biggest source for pre-releases at the time we moved to shut it down," said the British Phonographic Industry(BPI) in a statement.

"We provided the information to assist this investigation, but this is now a police matter and we are unable to comment further at this stage."

So far they're under suspicion of "conspiracy to defraud the music industry" and have faced questioning by detectives involved in the closure of OiNK late last year in "Operation Ark Royal."

From TF:

During their interview the suspects were asked all about OiNK, their understanding of the purpose of the site and what they did as a user there. The police were also keen to discover if these alleged pre-releasers personally knew OiNK admin, Alan Ellis, which of course - like the majority of OiNK members - they didn’t.

The police have been asking the suspects for their account details on OiNK. The police are in possession of user account names and email addresses registered on the site, but were keen for the suspects to provide their passwords, adding weight to the belief that user’s passwords were successfully encrypted with a salted MD5 hash.

Stay tuned former OiNK users.