During the summer, adult industry businessman Robert King embarked on an extremely aggressive anti-piracy project. Known online as AdultKing, the Australian-born 45-year-old said he would make it his mission to damage or destroy what he described as "the bad players" in the cyberlocker market.

"What I hope to achieve is very simple," he told TorrentFreak. "I want to tear apart the illegal file locker industry by removing its supply of funds and then ultimately removing its supply of network connectivity."

King's initial tactic was to focus on sites that sell premium subscriptions and those that offer users cash for uploading popular content. But quickly those parameters widened to include any site, no matter how big or small, that the 45-year-old considered to be profiting from piracy.

Armed with a huge list of sites, King and other like minded individuals have been gathering evidence of alleged copyright infringement and reporting it to the payment processors of file-hosting sites. Day after day since the summer King has reported successes, detailing how companies such as PayPal have frozen site funds, cut off their payment options and in some cases their ability to do business at all.

The 'Stop File Lockers' project hit its 90 day anniversary recently so having monitored developments on a daily basis since they began, TorrentFreak caught up with King to see where the campaign is three months on (all figures from late September).

"In that time we have shut down one or more forms of payment processing for 503 sites. This includes file lockers, resellers, plus piracy enablers we have needed to focus on in relation to a file locker investigation, image hosting sites or web hosts for example," King told us. "54 sites have gone offline completely, some we understand went offline with unpaid server bills. A further 34 sites are currently with no payment processing service and 22 of those we expect to go offline in the near future," added.

From very early in the campaign King has stressed that StopFileLockers isn't taking credit for every cyberlocker losing access to its funds or its ability to process payments, but what is clear is that his group has motivated, encouraged, and in some cases plain old annoyed payment processors into taking action.

During our time monitoring the StopFileLockers campaign we have seen a number of interesting developments. While one might expect that file-hosting sites and some file-sharers aren't that pleased with the project, what was perhaps more unexpected was the hostility King has faced from some elements of the adult content community itself.

"We have faced criticism from both pirates and our own constituency. Some people complain we're unfairly targeting legitimate business while others complain we haven't done enough," King admits.

Interestingly, while King and his associates are clearly putting in a lot of effort against file-hosting and any other sites connected to the infringement of adult material, many in the adult industry believe there is a bigger enemy – so called 'tube' sites that host a huge range of copyrighted content. But despite the threat, these are not on King's radar.

Controversially, King hasn't made any secret of the fact he has received financing for his StopFileLockers campaign from Manwin, the huge porn outfit now behind some of the world's biggest tube sites. Eyebrows have been raised at King's apparent enthusiasm for killing file-lockers, but for leaving tube sites alone. As reported in June, Manwin is also funding the Adult Content Industry United Foundation (ACIUF) anti-cyberlocker campaign.

Despite being happy to publish the claimed results of the campaign, King refuses to be drawn on his methodology. However, while it's clear that his team is putting in a significant amount of work, the hardening attitudes of companies like PayPal means that getting results is somewhat more streamlined than it has been in the past.

As revealed in an earlier article, PayPal is now demanding back-end access to all files hosted on file-hosting sites regardless of user privacy settings. For some, including hosting service PutLocker who explained the situation to us, that is simply a step too far. PutLocker has discontinued PayPal use and other services are either being forced to follow suit or are doing so under their own steam.

Watching how sites further adapt to a strangling of their finances will be something to keep an eye on in the months to come. King, it's pretty much certain, will be watching them.