US Government takes on Android piracy, pulls three sites offline

The United States Department of Justice has swung the hammer down on Android pirates, seizing three domains associated with cracked software.

On August 21st, the Department of Justic took appbucket.net, snappzmarket.net, and applanet.net offline after identifying and downloading thousands of 'popular copyrighted mobile device apps from the alternative online markets.'

It is estimated that the three sites hosted roughly 50,000 cracked apps between them.

Cracking skulls

The anti-piracy assault was spearheaded by the United States but it was done in collaboration with foreign governments.

Because many of the apps were stored on servers in France and the Netherlands, the US required – and received – assistance from local authorities to swiftly bring the three sites offline.

Earlier this summer, piracy problems forced Madfinger Games to make Dead Trigger free-to-play so that the it could compete with software counterfeiters.