The world’s most popular pirate torrent site KickAss Torrents is serving scareware advertising, helping dodgy call centre operators con users into handing over remote access to their machines.
KickAss Torrents gained the top spot among movie, TV, and software pirates after the temporary scuppering of the Pirate Bay, which spawned multiple mirrors and dispersed visitors.
ranked62 According to SimilarWeb KickAss Torrents is attracting some 332.5 million visitors a month. The Pirate Bay’s major .la mirror brings 72.7 million visitors.
Popup ads on the torrent site at the time of writing are throwing mimicked blue screen of death pages that warn would-be pirates that their credit cards, passwords, and photos could be compromised due to unspecified security threats.
Vulture South called the phone number listed on the ad: its IP location suggested the call centre uses virtual numbers localised to target victims.
An operator with an accent from the sub continent answered claiming to be from ‘technical support’.
