The most popular KickassTorrents mirror is not a mirror at all. At least, not one that lists torrents from the defunct KAT site. Instead, it's merely serving content from the Pirate Bay, misleading visitors with a KickassTorrents skin.

Last month KickassTorrents (KAT) was shut down by the U.S. Government, following the arrest of the site’s alleged owner.

Soon after the official site went offline various mirrors and copies launched to take its place, attracting hundreds of thousands of users.

One of the most popular mirrors started as KAT.am. The site was featured in several news reports with some suggesting that it’s an official reincarnation of KAT.

While the site has nothing to do with the original site, Hollywood was not happy, which resulted in a swift domain suspension. However, at the time of writing, the site continues to operate from the kickass.cd and kickass.mx domain names.

Those who visit the site will notice that it does indeed look a lot like the original KAT site. However, upon closer inspection is doesn’t even appear to be a mirror. Not of KAT at least.

Instead, the site is merely serving content from another well-known torrent site, The Pirate Bay.

This is best illustrated by comparing searches on both sites. Without exception, these return the exact same results in the same order, with the same numbers of seeds and peers.

For example, a search for “TPB AFK” returns 64 results on the Kickass.mx “mirror,” with the uploads from “SimonKlose” and MVGroup listed on top. These are all torrents that were originally added years ago.

The same search on The Pirate Bay returns identical results, without exception. Even the upload timestamps are exactly the same as on the KAT “mirror”.

As if that’s not enough, the recent torrents listings also show the same torrents, uploaded by the same usernames.

Of course, there is no recent KAT content to mirror, so the site has to use an external source for these. However, as far as we can see, all torrents on the site are being pulled from TPB, not KAT.

For comparison, a search for “TPB AFK” on a real KAT mirror shows a widget with movie details, which KAT had in place, as well as entirely different torrents uploaded by different users.

The screenshot below is taken from a Kickasstorrents mirror, which is a true mirror (but linked to scammers) and doesn’t have any recent torrents.

With the above in mind it’s clear that the operators of the Kickass.mx and Kickass.cd mirrors are not being entirely truthful, as they are no longer relying on a database of KAT torrents as previously claimed.

It could be that they started out this way, but at the moment it’s little more than a dressed-up TPB mirror.

These type of misleading claims are not new of course. The same happened when YIFY disappeared last year. With millions of estranged users it can be quite lucrative to “hijack” a popular brand such as KAT.

In any case, former KAT users should be aware that not everything they see on the Internet is what they believe it is, but I guess that’s no surprise by now.