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Notes -
Hm. If a particular pirate website has been active for a decade or more and consistent with their methods, do you think they're still untrustworthy?
A lot of pirate websites are more like warehouses than brands; people upload stuff (or link to stuff uploaded elsewhere, in the cyberlocker model) but it's not always the same people. There are specific pirate circles with reputations, but there are so many of them that it's tricky to keep track, and unless they use cryptographic signatures (and you have the tools to check them; not like the usual trust authorities are going to help) somebody could just be impersonating them.
Also, "SEO piracy and then use malware on noob pirates" doesn't strike me as the sort of business model that ages all that badly. Sure, you only get noobs, but there's an endless supply of those because piracy isn't exactly the sort of thing that everyone gets taught how to do by Trusted Sources*, and you're not really fighting the search engines (not to the extent that most scammers are, at least) because they typically try to hide both real and scam pirates. Obviously, you're running a criminal enterprise, but there are a bunch of countries where the government quietly tolerates that sort as long as they're mostly hitting foreigners (where do you think all the "your computer is infected with 50 viruses!" scam phone calls come from?).
*I'm reminded of this quote from an article on LW:
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