Today I received a DMCA notice from Xfinity via email that under my account someone has been torrenting. They have provided the IP and the name of the file.
We were out and I only had my son home. My son is saying he hasn’t been torrenting but I strongly believe he is not telling the truth unless we have been hacked which I doubt it. There is also a chance that my son has been inviting another friend home that we are not aware of.
Regardless of who has done it, since the account is under my name do you know if I should call Xfinity or just ignore the warning? Could this create trouble in the future?
I have never been encountering similar issues and I am not sure how to deal with this along with a million other life stuff that I am dealing with.
Any feedback will be appreciated.
If you think your son is lying to you, I wouldn’t ignore that, no. It seems that relationship needs some work.
If you meant should you ignore the DMCA notice… my question would be, as opposed to what?
Some 3rd party hired by media companies found your IP was torrenting a file and then sent a DMCA notice to Xfinity which Xfinity was required by law to forward to you. You can’t really contact Xfinity about this, they just forwarded the notice to you. It’d be like contacting the postal service for delivering a past due bill from a collections agency.
You also can’t contact the 3rd party that made the claim and sent the notice to Xfinity because it’s likely not identified in the letter and they wouldn’t care anyway and you would have now done the work for them of tying your name to your IP (currently only Xfinity knows that IP is yours) should the media company that hired them wanted to sue.
So, yes, ignore the DMCA letter since you can’t do anything else. No, don’t ignore your son lying to you. If you get a 2nd letter, I’d advise not let your son use your Internet anymore.
Other than your relationship with your son, I wouldn’t let this add to the stress in your life. There is very little chance of there being any consequences for this DMCA notice, or even a 2nd. 3rd or 4th you’d likely have your Internet disconnected until you promised Xfinity it wouldn’t happen again.
*The exception would be if the torrented file was pornographic, porn producers have been somewhat sue happy because just threatening to sue someone for their porn downloads usually results in a settlement because people value their reputation more than $1000.
Kids will lie to not get in trouble. Show him the warning with the time stamp. Dig into the computer’s history to confirm. Don’t let this be swept under the rug. This is coming from a parent of a teenager who has been known to hack websites and get in trouble, which he always denied.
I’ve been getting these for years. You can use it as kindling for a nice campfire or shred it. Either way, these notices are toothless attempts to scare you into compliance.
Don’t ignore it, treat it as a warning. You don’t need to call, just don’t let it happen again in the near future.
There are a couple of steps you could take using the router’s software or Xfinity app (depending what you are using);
- You could block ports above 1024, and that may stop him, unless he knows how to change the ports of his torrent software (and realizes that is the issue). Most torrent apps use higher purt numbers as the default… they can work on other ports, but I’m banking on him not realizing that the ports are blocked and therefore not knowing how to get around it.
- Create a blacklist of restricted websites, and add all of the most well-know torrent sites to it. That’s only going to work until he finds another site or proxy that isn’t on your list, but you can keep adding to that list as you discover more torrent sites.
These aren’t foolproof, but they’re worth a shot.
Have him use a vpn and bind it to his Ethernet adapter in windows. Those annoying letters will stop
Don’t ignore this warning unless you want Xfinity to pull your internet signal. Tell your son about the warning and tell him you will pull the internet yourself if this doesn’t stop.
First of all, Children will torrent things regularly.
If you don’t want your child to get you in trouble then buy the dude a subscription to a VPN service or heck, you can tell him to buy a server and setup his own VPN server if he is a tech nerd.
A VPN basically hides the fact that your child is torrenting sh*t from Comcast and also hides everything about what he is doing online 
I got an xfinity call long ago in my teen years my mom told me to call them. The guy was pretty nice and just told me don’t do it again. And I actually never torrented again. Just switched to free streaming sites lol.
You need to talk to your son about safe internet practices, such as using a VPN when torrenting
Xfinity won’t terminate service for the 1st warning and you don’t need to contact them. The 1st DCMA notice serves as a warning. Talk to whoever was home at the time shown on the DCMA notice and inform them that downloading copyrighted content is a big no no especially over your Internet connection. Show the DCMA notice with the timestamp to make sure they understand that you are not making up anything. You could even check there computer and see if any torrent clients are installed like uTorrent and the history.
I got one of these a couple years back.
I fought them, hard. First I called Comcast directly not the info in the email. Went through a lot of bs but they did say that it was for me.
At that point I started to argue that one, that torrent was never downloaded at my house. And two the ip address that they provided, wasn’t my ip address.
They tried to tell me and almost force me to admit to it.
Well guess who designed, built, and maintained cable and fiber networks… This guy. And I got tired of them telling me I was wrong, I knew how nothing worked, and that someone was stealing my internet.
I didn’t use Comcast crap. I used enterprise grade in my house.
Long story short. Basically I told them to eff off, ignored it.
TLDR: They can be wrong, ignore it.
All great advice. I put Qustodio (there is a free tier) on my sons pc and laptop (I bought both) which prevents him from going to a ton of places he shouldn’t be going. Also divorced and 50/50. The app also gives me a nice history of search and other items. I work in IT and I simply can’t risk his dumb teen ass doing something that impacts my career or local network. I told my son if he wants to buy his own hotspot with chore or gift $ he can download wtf he wants or tether to his phone and thats in his moms name lol
you said that there is a slight chance that a friend of his was at home with him when that happen. that could also be a possible source. your son may not have downloaded anything but that friend might have downloaded something using your wifi without your son knowing it.
you could also make sure that nobody outside your family is using your network. it may be a long shot but it could happen, a bad neighbor could be riding on your isp without you knowing it.
make sure that you have configured your network correctly. many people do not change the default password of their wifi after their equipment has been set up by the technician.
i am leaning on your son now knowing it because it has never happened when he is with your ex, so why would he do it when he is staying at your place?
so, these are just threat letters, and carry no weight of law. unless they actually sue you, its just that, a threat letter. just ignore it. don’t respond, don’t click on any links, do nothing. if you get another, tell you child to set up a VPN.
I literally got 5 dmca notices last Sunday because I forgot to turn on my VPN lol it happens. Is it really a crime to download files shared but others? Yes sadly because it’s all about money. Don’t get me wrong, I will support companies that I believe deserve my money but if they don’t and they have an item that I want then torrenting comes in. He is not stealing from anyone if it’s torrenting. It’s sharing files whether it be a game, movie, even TV shows. Nordvpn is what I have for my household. Having a VPN is a great thing I’m my opinion because it’s a sense of security more so than just a tool to get files. Hackers can track you easily through your IP address. VPN secures your network and you won’t have to worry about that. 2 years ago I was terrified because a women hacked into our babies nanny camera and was talking through the microphone. Ever since then I try what I can to keep my network secure
What I would say is just let him know that he doesn’t need to tell you what it was, just if he did something, and that he needs to learn to use the internet more securely (however you wanna interpret that.) My sister torrented a ton of stuff, and we got Xfinity letters, but it ended up being okay because she was finally willing to learn more about how technology works; I showed her the underlying principles of what she was doing.
Is the IP address in the report the one you’re currently using? That would be the first thing to check. The occasional accounting error isn’t unheard of, and this might be completely unrelated to you. While DHCP-allocated addresses can change over time, in practice they generally don’t change because there’s no real benefit to forcing address changes.
As to it being a “formal DMCA complaint” think of it as a formal request to knock it off. So long as you do “knock it off”, everything’s going to be fine. It’s extremely unlikely anyone’s going to sue you over it because everyone involved really has better things to do with their time.
The second thing to look into would be whether or not anyone else has the password for your SSID (wireless). If your son has friends over and they’re allowed to connect to your wifi, it could easily have been one of them–and it could easily have just been something they’d been running on their laptop and forgot about. I wouldn’t get terribly upset about this, but I’d make it clear to his friends that this thing happened and it made trouble for you, which means you’ve got a reason to make trouble for someone else. …then arch an eyebrow at them and say “So don’t make trouble for me, capice?”
…and of course if you’ve got an open wifi router with no password or an easily-guessable password on it, that practice stops now because someone’s probably figured out that they can use your connection to torrent whatever they want and leave you holding the bag. Likewise, WEP is obsolete (it takes like a minute to crack), and an open “Guest” network provided by your router is also something you should turn off, but WPA2 should be just fine given a decent password. Yes, it’s a pain to enter a long password into a smart TV, but you basically only have to do it once for each device, so change it to something that’s 12 characters or slightly longer, uses at least one number and an uppercase character, and you should be good unless one of your nearby neighbors has lots of time to kill. (Attacks against WPA2 are “challenging” but not impossible, and time-consuming enough that someone in a nearby van would probably need to be there for enough time to be very suspicious. People who can do it faster have better ways to get faster connections than yours.)
Note that the ‘xfinity’ SSID your cablemodem might be showing everyone by default with no protection should not show up with your usual IP address on it when someone uses it, and it should be requiring anyone to login with their own xfinity credentials to get around the capture portal so that’s probably not where the problem came from.
It is possible you’ve been hacked, as well. We found a device on our network when we got such a notice. The best thing to do is change your wifi passwords to be sure!
