Gauri Shankar, the alleged administrator of an illegal torrent website, whose arrest was reported on Tuesday evening, is not connected to the popular Tamil torrent sites Tamilrockers.co or tamilgun.com, it has emerged.
Gauri Shankar reportedly has no links to the key sites where the movies are uploaded, and is associated with a similarly named site called tamilgun.in.
Actor Vishal, president of Tamil Film Producers’ Council, and his team came across Gauri Shankar when they were trying to trace the administrators of tamilrockers.com and tamilgun.com, reports The Hindu. The two major sites are known to make many new movies available online immediately after or even before their official release.
Tracing the Internet Protcol (IP) address, they identified the administrator of the site, which they thought was the popular torrent site, as Gauri Shankar of Tirupatthur in Vellore district.
Under the pretence of being a dealer to upload new movies, Gauri Shankar was called to Triplicane.
Vishal and his men got hold of him and handed him over to the Deputy Commissioner of Police, Triplicane, alleging that he was a leading figure in online piracy.
During interrogation, the police found that the suspect was running a website called tamilgun.in that promoted advertisements in magazines and at times, even pornographic material. The administrator was earning a few thousand rupees a month through the business, the police said.
However, Gauri was in no way connected to tamilgun.com or tamilrockers.com.
The police suspect both these websites are operated from outside the country.
The investigation has further revealed that Gauri Shankar who was remanded to judicial custody had little internet knowledge or computers since he had studied only up to Class X.
In a related report, fan clubs of actor Vishal have formed ‘flying squads’ to check on theatres where his newly released movie 'Thupparivaalan' is being screened so as to prevent the illegal recording of the movie.
A representative from the Vishal's production house, Vishal Film Factory, told The Hindu five to six persons, would visit theatres across Tamil Nadu for the next four days.
Thupparivaalan, starring Vishal, Prasanna, Vinay and Andrea Jeremiah, was released on Thursday.