14 DAY TRIAL // Popular pirate sites have blacklisted the hordes of YIFY (YTS) impersonators that have appeared after the original group was shut down by the MPAA in New Zealand.
YIFY, the movie release group, and YTS.to, the website from where the group operated, are officially dead, as we previously reported.
The MPAA has managed to find the real identity of the group's leader, a young man living in suburban Auckland, in New Zealand. The MPAA sued, but the two parties reached an agreement, and the site silently shut down and was turned over to the MPAA a few days later.
An army of fake YIFY websites popped up in the last weeks
In its wake, YIFY left a void that very few other pirating groups were able to fill right away. This also left the door open for scammers to set up fake websites that used the group's name and take advantage of YIFY's reputation to feast on advertising money thanks to the huge traffic funneled through search engines.
But these are the cases where users were lucky, and they just didn't land on fake YIFY websites spreading malware, that didn't even have torrents hosted on them.
Now, as the waves from YIFY's abrupt shutdown have died down, it appears that YTS.ag is the most popular of these so-called YIFY impersonators. But instead of being promoted in the pirating community like the Popcorn Time clones were, YTS.ag seems to be despised.
YTS.ag blacklisted thanks to its owner's past deeds
Major torrent redistribution portals like ExtraTorrent, Kickass Torrents, and RARBG, have officially announced their plans to block YTS.ag movie releases from their databases. As TorrentFreak, a blog dedicated to torrent-related stories, reports, the three sites are doing it for two reasons.
The first is out of respect for the original YIFY (YTS) team, not allowing other nefarious groups to capitalize on their hard work.
The second reason is a little bit more complicated, but apparently the people behind YTS.ag are the same individuals that hijacked the EZTV portal from its true owner.
Now, the other big torrent portals are paying back an old debt, by making sure the crooks that forced EZTV to shut down are not allowed to capitalize on YIFY's death as well.
