Dutch anti-piracy group Brein claimed last week to have closed down 422 torrent sites in the first half of this year, but shockingly* nobody actually noticed until today.

TorrentFreak belatedly reported that it had failed to read Brein’s press release, dated 8 July, and the freetard-loving site apologised to its readers for the oversight, before explaining that the whole torrent community could be doomed.

According to TorrentFreak, Brein “stunned the world” by being so active against torrent sites so far this year.

However, the world doesn’t actually appear to be listening all that much to Brein right about now, given that TorrentFreak was the only blog to eventually get around to reporting about the pro-copyright group’s breathless restlessness in the face of pesky pirates.

"Today … we have a big apology to make,” wrote TorrentFreak’s enigmax.

“We’ve let you all down and we’ve let ourselves down too by completely missing one of the biggest developing stories the BitTorrent world has ever known. We’ve totally neglected to cover what can only be described as a wholesale slaughter of file-sharing venues in The Netherlands, and for this we wholeheartedly apologise.”

Brein claimed last week that it had successfully cut off 422 “illegal” websites, including 384 BitTorrent portals and 29 link sites to so-called cyber lockers. In addition, the outfit said it shuttered five Usenet indexers, six streaming sites and one FTP summit site.

So it’s been pretty busy this past six months. The only trouble is, no one really noticed… or even cared. ®

*We apologise for not bringing you this news.