The Pirate Bay has been down for less than a day and already the rumor machine is firing on all cylinders. Contrary to several reports in the Sydney Morning Herald and elsewhere, The Pirate Bay has not been resurrected and is not operating under a new domain. Not yet at least.

There hasn’t been this much panic in the file-sharing world since 2006. Back then the cause was a huge police raid that targeted The Pirate Bay in its Swedish homeland. Now, eight years later, it’s deja vu all over again.

As everyone knows by now, yesterday morning Swedish police raided a data center in Nacka, Stockholm. A little time later The Pirate Bay disappeared offline and late last evening anti-piracy group Rights Alliance took responsibility for the complaint that forced the site offline.

In the hours that followed dozens of news reports appeared, most of which accurately reported the facts so far. However, several outlets, Sydney Morning Herald included, reported overnight that The Pirate Bay was in the process of being resurrected at a brand new domain.

The domain mentioned in most of the reports is the Costa Rica based ThePirateBay.cr. As can be seen from the screenshot below, it does indeed look like The Pirate Bay.

Only adding to the excitement (or perhaps causing it), plenty of posts appeared on Reddit trumpeting this domain as the site’s new home. Sadly, however, these reports are wide of the mark.

ThePirateBay.cr is a Pirate Bay proxy/mirror service (it’s listed by Proxybay) and as such relies entirely on The Pirate Bay for its torrent content. Currently it has none. The site appears to be operating out of the Netherlands and only became widely available in October.

While admittedly quite popular in India (it recently became its 1,349th most popular site according to Alexa, already people are proclaiming the .CR domain as the new Pirate Bay. In fact, someone has already begun marketing a range of t-shirts, hoodies, mugs, posters and greetings cards carrying the site’s name.

The confusion appears to stem from the fact that some “proxy” homepages stay up even when The Pirate Bay goes down as they cache some content. As can be seen from the screenshot below, another proxy ‘labaia.me‘ displays just fine, but then does nothing when the user attempts to find torrents.

While still in the early hours following the shutdown, there’s nothing to suggest that The Pirate Bay’s domains have fallen into the hands of the authorities. This suggests that if the site does reappear, it will do so via one of its existing domains, although that position is certainly open to change.

In the meantime users should be cautious of sites claiming to be “the new Pirate Bay”. While most probably just want to get some traffic, there could be others with more nefarious ideas in mind.

Update: Apparently the commercialism doesn’t stop at novelty items. The .CR domain listed above was briefly diverting users to another domain (thepiratebay.ee) which demands anything from $4 to £4 for users to access torrents – AVOID.

Update: The .ee domain removed the paywall, but it’s still nothing more than a mirror without new content.

Spotted any other Pirate Bay scams? Please let us know.