It’s a cold summer for the torrent community. Last month pirates’ favorite tracker KickassTorrents shut down following the arrest of alleged founder Artem Vaulin and last week the internet’s largest meta-search engine, Torrentz.eu, mysteriously closed its doors.
With two of its major players out of the picture, the torrent community had a massive gap to fill up and it didn’t take long before a bunch of clones spurred. Now it turns out not all of these mirrors are genuine.
Popular KickassTorrents clone KAT.am – recently taken down following a run-in with Hollywood – has now resurfaced on the Web; but this time as a scam aimed at stealing your bank account details.
While at first glance the site appears to be a fully functional KickassTorrents mirror, once you attempt downloading a torrent, the website immediately prompts you to sign up for a ‘free account’, then proceeds to ask for credit card information.
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Unlike the malicious copycat, the original KickassTorrents never required additional financial data and even allowed two-factor authentication.
As Hackread and TorrentFreak both speculate, the most likely scenario is that following its recent suspension, KAT.am became available for registration anew and was subsequently picked up by scammers.
Needless to say, the ill-intentioned KickassTorrents knockoff has nothing to do with the original tracker.
Be careful, pirates: Downloading something for ‘free’ might end up costing you an arm and a leg – and a lot of nerves, too.
via Hackread
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