During the past several weeks, with blockades of The Pirate Bay biting in both the Netherlands and the UK, sites which facilitate access to the world's most famous torrent site have been popping up in their dozens. However, not all of these sites have users' best interests at heart. Several, flying in the face of the very fiber of The Pirate Bay, have had the temerity to do the unthinkable - charge for free downloads.

As time progresses, Internet users in general are becoming more wise to the general scams, cons and rip-offs of the online world.

These evils take many forms, from rich African dignitaries looking to share their wealth with strangers, to a worried ‘PayPal’ advising users to enter their username and password to ensure their accounts are still secure.

In the file-sharing world, however, things are often a little more subtle. People’s bank accounts aren’t usually emptied, but novices to the pastime are often taken for a ride for relatively small sums of money by people out to make a quick buck. Often these people take advantage of changes in the market, upsets in the status quo, and times of uncertainty to deliver their payload.

When the blockage of The Pirate Bay in the Netherlands became the hot topic in recent weeks, thousands of people were looking for ways to access the site. Inevitably lists of proxies appeared, most of which worked particularly well. But thanks to opportunists, some were problematic.

Although perhaps not technically a straightforward proxy, one site – ThePirateBay.ee (note the .ee extension) – became particularly popular. The site first appeared during the last quarter of 2011 and was an almost perfect clone of TPB with identical functionality. Intermittently, however, it pulled a sly little trick.

Sometimes the magnet / torrent links would disappear and up would come a box that wouldn’t clear until people made a ‘donation’. Seasoned Pirate Bay users aren’t so easily fooled of course, but countless others have been sucked in. TorrentFreak asked The Pirate Bay about this site and they weren’t impressed.

“Charging money for free downloads is against the whole philosophy of the internets. We do not condone anything like that. This site is a bad copy of other sites, like TPB, and it’s totally meaningless. Go for another site,” they told us.

The .EE is not the only fly in the ointment either. The Pirate Bay now say that they’ve found at least three sites charging for access. It also seems that in return the team are having a little fun at those sites’ expense.

The TPB crew say they have “re-hijacked” visitors to one and are now directing them back to their official blog. Furthermore, ThePirateBay.ee appears to have been visited by a pirate David Blaine who has made all ‘their’ content disappear.

However, just in case the .EE data reappears in a second puff of smoke, Greasemonkey users can use a couple of scripts to remove cash demands and replace them with torrent and magnet links instead. Really, though, it’s better not to use the site at all.

As the proxy wars heat up, The Pirate Bay renamed itself The Hydra Bay today, linking off its main page to PirateReverse.info, an information site dedicated to helping people to access not just TPB, but several other leading torrent sites too.