Apartment Banned Me from Using Wi-Fi
So I live in an apartment complex and have been for the past year with not many issues but about a week ago I went up to use my computer only to find I could not for the life of me, connect to the Wi-Fi. I checked my emails on my phone and saw an email stating that my “right to Wi-Fi has been revoked.”
When I went down to the office, I was told that the ISP had found out that I was committing illegal activity and so they decided to turn off my Wi-Fi. The office said that if I signed a contract they had written up in which I would admit to committing illegal activities (which they said to be BitTorrent) and agreed to pay the “_damages_” that they had sustained due to my illegal activity (which they said would likely be in the hundreds to the thousands), I would get Wi-Fi back BUT not for my main PC which is permanently banned from using Wi-Fi.
From what i have read about BitTorent, it is a pirating service for downloading movies. I NEVER downloaded this service NOR have downloaded any movies on any PC, especially this one. Even if they think I pirated games, ALL of the games on my computer are from Steam or Battle.net and none are pirated (nor would I trust any sites to even attempt to pirate games). I check microsoft Defender multiple times and there is no malware anywhere on the computer nor was there before i got cut off.
I feel so distraught because I didn’t do anything and the only way I can get Wi-Fi back is to pay hundreds of dollars and admit to something I am sure I didn’t do. Please anyone help explain what happens and what I should do 🙁
P.S. The lady from the office barely knows how to use a Mac and she’s accusing me of using something she doesn’t even understand in the most minuscule sense of the word. I code and have built my computers and would like to think I am relatively tech savvy and still after reading up on this stuff, I feel like I barely understand what I am being accused of so I’m not sure how is she is able to confidently accuse me of illegal activity 🙁
P.P.S. I don’t live in any of the places that it’s saying I sent information to or whatever is saying happened.
41 Comments
Bittorrent isint illegal, and they likely have no way to prove that you did something illegal. And if they use the desktop name to match to your computer anyone can just change their desktop name to any other desktop so they cant prove that you did it.
damages what damages
call a lawyer
Spoof your MAC address or buy a new Wi-Fi card.
Could also get a Wi-Fi extender, connect that to their Wi-Fi and then plug your PC into it with Ethernet.
It’s called a vpn they cannot tell what you are doing online if you use a vpn.
Disable network adapter, change your MAC address from device manager, and your hostname from system settings. Re-enable adapter, ban should go away. Use a VPN for future torrents (and maybe put on a speed limiter so you don’t get blocked again for hogging the bandwidth so much)
“my main PC which is permanently banned from using Wi-Fi.”
There is no such thing as permanently banned, the company/guy who set this up can unban you in less than 30 seconds. Also, this is probably a MAC address ban so you have 2 options:
* Spoof your MAC address on the WiFi card
* Buy a USB WiFi dongle and you can connect to your place’s WiFi
The first one is free but you need to tinker your computer a little bit, the second one will be somewhere in the $10-15 on Amazon.
Also, a lot of software and games use torrent protocol for sharing updates so you could get false flagged for torrenting games/movies, etc. Also, also, just to be sure, change your wifi password.
Dude, how can you “code” and build computers and not know what torrenting is.
Figure out what a VPN is, and use it.
>ALL of the games on my computer are from Steam or `Battle.net`
do any of the games you play use a separate launcher that may be using the bittorrent protocol to distribute downloads to cheap out on server costs?
family member got a letter from their ISP about suspicious activity going on from their network. It was a compromised system that was sending spam email. and it resulted in them blocking the email ports for that connection.
So perhaps some of your devices are compromised? BitTorrent could be any signature.
Question:
* Do you have a dedicated username/password for your appartment?
* Have you installed any new softwares recently?
* Have any tried doing any form of file sharing recently?
* Does anyone else have access to your computer?
Torrent is used for sharing stuff between people directly. While it can be used for illegal sharing you can use it for legal purposes too. Unless they can prove you had transferred something illegal you don’t have to cave in.
Get a lawyer if you have to but don’t budge.
Sign nothing
Contact lawyer
Get your own private Internet service.
As far as im aware bittorrent is just a peer to peer download and is not illegal in and of itself, legality depending on what you download
If you’re not doing peer to peer transfers or torrenting then you need to check your pc for malware.
I wouldn’t be surprised if someone signed into the Wifi with your credentials to do their torrenting. It’s not that uncommon.
* Did you buy the computer second hand, or allow someone else to use it?
* Has someone spoofed your IP address to hide their behavior?
* What sort of encryption does your Wifi have? Are you using it?
Lol what!?? There are millions of legal legitimate files downloaded through BitTorrent!
Where the fuck do you live? That’s horrifying to read.
bittorrent isnt made to use for piracy from first place but its easy way to pirate stuff. its peer to peer file serving software.
there is nothing illegal to have bittorrent to be installed or downloading legal stuff trought it, but its very popular way to download pirated stuff
VPN, they won’t be able to see shit lol
Does you apartment provide the internet or do you have it seperately? If it’s seperate, are you using your own router or the ISP’s router? If you’re using their router then just buy your own router so they can’t change stuff on your router like banning you computer.
get your own internet. get a discount on your rent since you are no longer using their wifi
Nah bro just get your own wifi and fuck em
Packet sniffing can be consider a breach of reasonable privacy. I would read into the law and 100% get a vpn
So get your own internet…
The signature mentioned in the report is a detection rule for network traffic. While it claims to detect BitTorrent traffic, in practise it triggers false positives on non-bittorrent traffic more often than not. In my professional experience, handling such rules including this particular one (which is open source, for reference) this rule triggering is not evidence of anything. The underlying traffic, could indicate exactly what is happening, i.e. bittorrent or not. They have not provided that, only metadata. From a purely technical point of view, the have no basis to ban you from the network.
Besides what everyone said, I’d also say “DON’T SIGN ANYTHING!!!”
I find it funny they literally just took some screenshots of the ubiquiti threat report, printed it out, and sent them to you instead of a proper letter.
Anyway, VPNs are your friend. And like the other comments have said, change your Mac address
wait!, so your apartment complex doesn’t provide any kind of wired connection?…and on top of that you are all on a shared network…I would move out or if not possible get your own 5g mobile network box thingy and use that for internet, a smart phone is different but can do temporarily…you should get one of those boxes dedicated for using in a home network for internet, if you do decide to keep using that weird shared wifi network, get a vpn, I would also try to figure out some way to use your own router on that network.
There’s so much wrong with this I say it’s more likely your condo is trying to scam you
where do you live? I mean, what country?
Good old UniFi 👍
Just change the NIC MAC address and you’ll be unbanned
I manage multiple Unifi locations (which is the software your apartment complex uses) and a P2P alert (which is what you are receiving) doesn’t really mean anything, there are multiple games that use P2P and websites that use it too (for example, the now defunct Omegle)
Even if you play GTA Roleplay they use a strange implementation of P2P and it will show in the dashboard
Also, you can just change your MAC address and keep going, that is what they banned (unless you connect with a cable, then they probably disabled your port).
If you spoof your MAC remember to change your computers name because they will know it’s your PC with that.
Also if they block it again don’t go to the office, because the only way they have of knowing your laptop is owned by you is when you go to the office asking why the wifi doesn’t work
the kicker is that torrents can be used for any kind of p2p download, it doesnt necessarily have to be piracy
iirc the Heaven gpu benchmark could be downloaded via torrent … legally
Even if you did use a VPN, 146 BYTES?? What, you only downloaded the metadata?
146 bytes?!? That’s not enough data to even be anything illegal! At most, you downloaded 1% of an MP3. WTF even is this nonsense?
This is new to me. Living in an appartment where the landlord pays and regulates wifi?
I’ve only encountered this in student domes, which sucked because they were down half of the time. Not to mention the security risk (not that it mattered much back then, but once you’re out of college I wouldn’t trust a shared hotspot).
Seems to suck either way, shouldn’t you get your own & be rid of this BS?
If you’re really worried about it, go to your local comptuer store and buy a USB wifi dongle, they are fast and inexpensive. Completely new mac address altogether. If you really aren’t torrenting i would also scan your computer using malwarebytes or an AV to make sure there’s nothing funky going on.
ISP sent the apartment a copyright notice, likely forwarded from a copyright holder. Most of those notices include the offending IP address and source port. They used access logs from their ubiquiti network devices to trace it back to OPs computer and leased internal IP. That device name link almost certainly goes to their DHCP leasing with additional details and timestamps.
OP isn’t telling us everything here. You don’t even need to be a competent network admin to see that. Plus, I get the feeling apartment is code for uni/college dorm and they would have a full admin team on site that could dig into it even further than just some office staff.
Even if that’s not the case, if it’s a shared wifi network then the apartment would at least have an MSP handling it, and again, there’s more knowledge there than just some office staff like OP suggests.
Everyone telling OP to just get around the rules is gonna get them evicted, especially if this is a campus building, lol.
Ubiquiti security alerts are notoriously bad and inaccurate.
Also, use a VPN.