How to cheat torrent ratio and not get caught? Part 1
We receive tons of feedback about hacking torrent ratio on private trackers. I will reply on interesting questions in this blog. We hope that this information will be useful for many our users.
First of all, you need to understand how the torrent tracker works. The best part is that it’s easy. The private torrent tracker is some sort of database. It stores information about torrents and users. Each user has a passkey, average download and upload speeds, active torrents list. The passkey is used to identify the user. That’s why when you give your .torrent file to somebody and he downloads or uploads anything, it affects your torrent ratio. Each torrent record has a list of seeders and leechers.
When the torrent client starts, it sends a request with both the passkey and torrent information to the tracker. The Server returns a list of seeds and peers. Now the client can download or upload.
It makes many ways to cheat the torrent ratio on private trackers. It’s possible because the tracker cannot exactly count size of uploaded and downloaded files for each user because of many reasons:
- DHT
- Network problems
- Cheating software
- Torrent server overload
The tracker “knows” the average connection speed only. Torrent client sends from time to time size of downloaded and uploaded data and the server can calculate average speed. The simplest cheating method is increasing upload and it works very well. The more you upload, the higher rating you get. Many admins are trying to fight with this kind of cheating, but they cannot do it well. All that they know is the average speed. The only possible reason of the ban is unreal high speed.
Especially it’s a problem for Ukraine, Russian, Romanian, Indian users. Internet service providers have a very low speed in these countries or high-speed connections are costly. Local trackers admins know it well and ban people easy if they increase upload a lot. Lets take for example a report from our Russian user. He wrote that most of users have a download speed of about 1-3 mbit/s and upload is 0.1-2 mbit/s in Russia. His connection is 2 mbit/s download and 512kbit/s upload. It’s hard to keep a high share ratio with such connection. He is able to download 4 times more than upload for same time! It’s a very suspicious if he increases upload to 500% and he knows it. He increased upload on 50% for a week and found out that TRK works good. Then he increased on to 100%, then to 200% and his ratio went up. The tracker didn’t detect any cheat because it’s a normal upload speed. If you know the average speed of Internet service providers in your area it allows you to setup upload increase safely.