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
My guess is that people have tried and failed taking them down, and I'm pretty sure at least some of vB.orgs rules are being violated by just talking about them, but heres my 2cents.
Sure they copy the skins and hacks released here, but that just means more publicity for you, I think that they leave copyrights and linkbacks intact, and I'm pretty sure that they click installed on the mod/skin.
As far as I can see, they don't 'null' vBulletin, they merely redistribute copies nulled by other groups... and to null one copy of vBulletin, you must first buy it, so vBulletin is gaining a little money, surely.
They are organised, as far as I can see, and I see that they have the same type of questions that are found here, in the general discussion area, and they offer the same advices.
If this was all they did, offer vBulletin support and hacks, would they not be the same as vB.org?
Just wondering, and not defending them or anything.