What actually happened to Kickass Torrents
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| 2008–2016 | KAT grows into the world's largest torrent index, moving between domains (kickasstorrents.com → kat.cr) |
| July 2016 | US DOJ seizes the domains; the alleged operator is arrested in Poland |
| Late 2016 | Former staff and moderators launch a community revival at katcr.co |
| 2017–2026 | Hundreds of unaffiliated “kickass” clones recycle the old name and database for ad money |
The distinction matters: katcr.co is a community project by people connected to the original site. The rest of the “kickass” landscape — kickasstorrents.to, kat.am, kickass.sx and whatever tops the proxy lists this month — is anonymous operators monetising a dead brand.
Why KAT clones are riskier than most mirrors
A mirror of a living site at least serves current content. KAT clones mirror a site that stopped existing — their databases are stale scrapes, their upload communities don't exist, and their entire reason to operate is monetisation: aggressive ad stacks, fake download buttons, crypto miners, and torrent files quietly swapped for malware carriers. With no real community behind the content, there's nobody to flag the bad files.
The general mirror risks from our 1337x guide apply here at full strength, plus the staleness problem on top.
If you're blocked from a torrent site that actually exists
The productive version of the “kickass proxy” search in 2026 is reaching a living index (katcr.co, or the sites in our 1337x and Pirate Bay guides) from a network where it isn't blocked:
- Get a private proxy IP in an unrestricted country.
- Configure it at browser or system level — see the SOCKS5 setup guide.
- Visit the real domain directly and verify the certificate.