Abandonia and Abandonware in general is not illegal. It's simply not legal.
"Huh?" I hear you say?
Abandonware is inside a grey area of the law which never truely been investigated in the vast majority of the world. Until a worldwide concensus about this happen, Abandonware is not illegal but those who have the copyright rights have all rights to ask for contents to be removed from someone who is using it against their will. This "policing" business usually is made by the companies themselves, and it is the reason why ESA been created. ESA is, in fact, the grouping of a lot of companies who wish to protect their copyright rights and pay a single specialised company to do the work for them.
So stop trying to make us feel bad because "OMG, Abandonia is illegal!". Everybody knows, nobody care.
Back to the subject, the leecher... If the site in question was offering to be paid to give out links all around the WWW for the games the users are looking for, then link to the site or the review in question... Then there would be no problems at all. Not only that, but it would be plainly legal because the guy, like you said, would be offering his service in return of a payment.
What is happening here, however, is not the case. The guy ask for money supposedly for his own bandwith, then direct link to the files but from other sites without ever mentioning the review, the site direct linked to or even ask the webmaster of the leached site if he agrees. It's a scam, pure and simple. Both way.
How many people a week do you think would actually pay for this "service" if it was explained to them that the site they are paying to is actually only linking to reviews of another site which offer the game free of charge? Do you think a lot of people would actually bother to pay the first site when they understand that they would have found what they were looking for without having to pay anything here simply by using a search engine? Which they probably already did, but were unfortunate enough to click on the scammer link first. There is ways to get listed first in search engines, and that's actualy easy. You can bet such scammers do their best to achieve just that to catch as many fish in their net as they can.
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