Three Canadian travelers who met each other in Australia decided to become the next big thing in torrent tracking, setting up their own search site at the end of November. And even though it had no users, it was enough to get their visas cancelled and have them thrown out of the country.

The long-winded tale came about due to one of the men using his credit card to pay for some internet advertising in Oz. As he’d been travelling the world, he’d also used the card in South Africa, where it had been accessed fraudulently.

This led the cops to Australia, where the card details were then spotted in association with their newly created torrent search engine Torrentfind, and thus the trio were paid a visit by Australia’s IP police who voided their tourist visas for “abusing piracy” — giving them 30 days to leave the country or face arrest.

User stats generated by TorrentFreak show the site’s main and pretty much only ever user had an IP address locating him or her to a local Australian government computer — presumably the person investigating the site’s operations. They were busted for a piracy site no one has ever actually used, apart from the cops. [TorrentFreak]