Yify who is

The Kiwi mastermind behind one of the world's biggest movie piracy groups says his operation was just a "fun" hobby. In March this year, it was revealed the suit was filed against year-old Aucklander Yiftach Swery. He did not respond to requests for comment this week.

In the online forum, the person claiming to be Swery revealed that he never thought of himself as a criminal, and providing tens of thousands of illegally-sourced movies for download was a "hobby" that he never intended to make money with. He said it was a good way to teach himself practical programming skills.

Despite the illegality of what he was doing, Swery was never concerned with hiding himself from authorities. He said he "loved bragging about it" to friends and family.

Swery's activities were hampered by New Zealand's slow internet, and he was forced to use overseas servers to encode and upload the movies. He said he chewed through between and GB of data per month. He had a team of about eight people from around the world who helped convert the videos to the right format and upload them, but he said he never met any of them in person. I respect what they did and would thank them a bunch in person if I could. It was no secret that most of our sources were from normal Scene uploaders.

This is essentially how it all played out. Worry soon turned to anger, though, as the imposters tried to claim official ownership over the YIFY moniker. While the real YIFY is no longer operating, his departure from movie piracy has done nothing to dent the Scene. He started uploading movies and TV series for free on various websites in With that said, readers should understand that the brand YIFY came into being not just because of Yiftach but a whole group of people who worked on the product.

Yiftach has moved on and the whole team behind YIFY has also moved on to do something more copyright-friendly with their lives.

YIFY did make a huge impact in the torrent community and redefined the quality of content that the torrent scene offered to torrent users. YIFY was shut down, but the case was never tried publicly in court. Since the site has been shut down, lots of fake sites that claim to be YIFY have been created.

Many of them are still active today. This site uses Akismet to reduce spam.