Point taken, I removed the whois information I wasn't as thorough as I usually am about that stuff.

However, the advertising link is valid.

Also, it's valid to report the nulled copies they blatantly have up. vB has resources we regular users don't.

Yep I've reported them on that front as well. Chances are they themselves are using a nulled copy as well.

Since they are probably hosted in a country that doesn't care about copyrights the advertising is probably the easiest to get them with thou.

you not going to get nowhere so dont waste your energy.If you take one down they just move to a new host and send new url out and the only loser will be you wasting your time on it.
My view on sites hosting vb hacks is i simply dont care.I come here to get what i need and thats all that matters to me.Remember a hack is like everything else,its only useful if someone can find a use for it.Many hacks will be copied from here and posted on other boards,but that dont mean there is 1000`s of users lining up to download them.

I'm not attempting to take them down, my attempts are focused in cutting off their profits.

Allow me to interrupt.
As I am also the victim of piracy.

There are 4 threads linking from the vbteam concerning request to rip my stuff even my skins are sold at a very affordable price.
But I dont really care about them because I got overexposed. At one time a vietvb also releasing my skins and I contacted them because their thread doesnt recognise me as the rightful owner.They release it just like their own.

go here and report for breaching the terms of service.

Wouldn't it be best reporting them to their sponsors each and everytime?

Hit them where it hurts. I'm sure with the people visiting their forum, they go there because they don't want to pay for anything so cutting into their income/revenue by reporting them to their ad sponsors thus the owner will need to pay for the upkeep of his/her site from his/her own pocket.

I'm sure if enough people made reports these ad companies would need to delete/void their ad account.

Maybe nexy can step in here and answer this one for me and tell me it cannot be done with every ad company they use.

actually it can be done with "legal" advertisers... but most of them are offshore... it's a complete/complex network i must say, even i do not understand the goals there... nobody get paid or what? **

it's easy for anybody to alert googleAds, they just cut the ads and take legal actions to be refund if they ever paid them before... which is rare, or we would've heard of them. but most of these pirates sites are not financed because of the ads, they use them to spread the words... these sites are found because people search for them and google show the links, no matter the piracy or not -- google is not there to enforce any law.

i evaluated personally the number of copies spread on the net for my own releases over the last 5 years... less than 10% of the entire count of my own releases on vb.org and my own place... that means i loose 10% of incomes each day. will i have to invest 10% of my time to track them and make them pay or die?...

when you go at McDonalds, they loose 15% of all of what they cook, it goes directly in the trash, or is dropped on the floor because some kid hit the bucket. do they loose 15% of their time tracking kids to not loose these buckets?!... they prefer making more fries... :)

ok, we're not that big as McDonalds, but the more we do, the harder is for them to release and support all our work. ;)

note: ** ads like the one you see on vbTeam... you will never be able to break their deals. these ads are offered by their host, which is offshore which is paid by the ads to display unsollicited ads, which is there only to make profit from hosting illegal websites... etc...

Wow I never been to vbteam before now I just seen their site and I must say they are pretty much organised and the people and staff of that forums seem to be very skilled. I am not mentioning the name of the person but there is a guy who even managed to make a vb4 style from the pictures released recently for vb 3.8.x already!!

They also seem to release their own addons and product modifications, skins apart from stealing stuffs from here.

I don't meant to praise them but I would say they are pretty organized for an illegal site.

Taking them down may not work by cutting down the ad revenue they get. I hold a decent phpbb forums myself with good traffic but my ad revenue never crossed 40 or 50 tops bucks a month. I don't think they will be depend on that to run their forums.

My guess is taking them down will be a hard task or possibly not possible.

regards