Sowet.com

[MacTrans]

The DownUpTime tool indicates that sowet.com has been completely dead for about a week.

The thing I liked about sowet.com was the fact that they had dedicated forums for hobbyists who are in to TS providers, one for general discussion and one for reviews. If anything, the use of phony pictures is much more rampant in for providers advertising TS services than "normal" providers. Sowet was a pretty valuable tool because of the forum that it provided a discussion-space for this, and the management of the board seemed to leave that section pretty much to itself--I don't think anyone posting on the TS sowet boards ever had their posts edited or pulled.

I am unaware of any other forum that has anything like this available, so I think that sowet will be missed by this subset of local hobbyists.

As for what happened to sowet.com, your guess is as good as mine. I doubt that the feds have seized it, as some have suggested. When the feds have seized sites such as myredbook.com, they put up a message that reads:

This domain name has been seized by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), as the result of a joint investigation by the FBI and the Internal Revenue Service.

This domain name is subject to both civil and criminal forfeiture. This seizure is based on probable cause to believe that this domain name was involved in money laundering derived from racketeering based on prostitution in violation of state and federal law.

Property, including domain names, involved in violating Title 18, United States Code, Section 1957, is subject to civil and criminal forfeiture to the United States pursuant to Title 18, United States Code, Section 981(a)(1)(A) and Section 982(a)(1).

To report information about a crime to the FBI, please call 1-800-CALL-FBI.

It is, of course, possible that management of Sowet learned of a LE investigation and decided to shut everything down prior to getting busted. If so, I would not be surprised if they physically removed the digital storage from their server and physically destroyed it.

[The Oxymoron]

I think that's enough speculation... I'm sure RT is fine and is living his life.

This thread is closed.