Due to court imposed blockades hundreds of thousands of Pirate Bay users rely on proxy websites to access their favorite BitTorrent site. However, starting three days ago several of the most popular proxies turned evil, only allowing users to download torrents if they agreed to install crapware. The Pirate Bay team is not happy with this move and has threatened to retaliate.

In recent months Pirate Bay proxies have become extremely popular.

After several large ISPs in the UK and the Netherlands were ordered to block the BitTorrent site earlier this year, reverse proxy sites popped up left and right.

A list of 100+ of these proxies is maintained by PirateReverse, which has been plugged by The Pirate Bay on several occasions. However, starting three days ago several of the proxies on the top of this list turned evil.

Piratereverse.info, Livepirate.com and Getpirate.com are among the sites that started to force nasty crapware on visitors. Those who visited the sites in question could no longer click on any of the download links unless they installed the SnappyDee toolbar.

While the image below suggests that the offer can be canceled, the same pop-over simply reloaded when we tried. And we are not the only ones who noticed this.

Proxy crapware

These toolbar makers offer publishers up to $1 per install so these schemes can be quite lucrative. Assuming that thousands of people accepted these “free download” offers, the operator(s) of the proxy sites in question may have raked in a healthy profit over the weekend.

Needless to say, The Pirate Bay team is not happy with this development. They told TorrentFreak that they have a few options to take these sites out if they continue to force these toolbars on their users.

TorrentFreak contacted PirateReverse for a comment on the situation, asking how it can be that their domain also serves these ads. We have yet to hear back but on their Twitter account PirateReverse says it has nothing to do with the toolbar offer. It could be that the people maintaining the proxy list are not the same as those who operate the proxy.

Whatever the case, The Pirate Bay team is now encouraging proxy users not to accept these scammy offers, and to use alternatives proxies such as the one operated by the UK Pirate Party.

As more and more ISPs are ordered to block The Pirate Bay, proxy sites continue to gain in popularity. Yesterday the Finnish ISP Sonera began blocking the torrent site after a court order, and soon Tele Finland is expected to follow suit.

Due to the widespread availability of proxies the blockades are believed to be ineffective, something Dutch and UK ISPs recently confirmed.

Update: Right after we finished writing this article the crapware vanished from the proxies, at least temporarily.

Update: The PirateReverse people replied with the following message.

“We now only manage about.piratereverse.info which includes the guide and proxy list, we do not manage the actual proxy, this has been delegated to a totally separate team. It is unfortunate that this has taken place, and we started our own investigation to find out what is happening.”