Anxiously awaiting the return of Kickass Torrents? Beware malicious mirrors.
As Torrent Freak notes, popular clone KAT.am has resurfaced after being yanked by Hollywood studios. But you might want to avoid it; the site wants to steal your banking info, not serve you pirated content. It asks users trying to download content to sign up for a "free account" that requires credit card information.
It's likely that scammers scooped up the domain after it was pulled offline and are trying to make a buck.
The original KAT was taken down and its alleged founder Artem Vaulin was detained in Poland last month on copyright infringement charges. Assistant Attorney General Leslie Caldwell said Vaulin will be charged for "unlawfully distributing well over $1 billion of copyrighted materials."
The 30-year-old Ukranian is said to have used several servers around the world to move his domains whenever the site came under attack by law-enforcement officials. He was ultimately taken down, according to TorrentFreak, after Apple reportedly provided information related to an iTunes transaction linked with an account used to log into KAT's Facebook account.
KAT was one of the most popular torrent sites on the Internet, offering hundreds of millions of copyrighted movies, video games, songs, television show episodes, and more. It was even bigger than The Pirate Bay.
Since it was taken down, KAT has been mirrored and many of those mirrors work just as the site of old did. Proceed at your own risk and never hand over credit card details.
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