Summary
Whether it’s a post from an NFL team or a youth team, whenever there’s an announcement that a match is streaming online, there will be scammers around. Here’s why you shouldn’t follow these links to stream sports online.
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Transcript
This month, fans of America’s most popular sport have celebrated the return to the gridiron. However, every time you have a popular event, you’ll have scammers looking for ways to steal people’s money. Here is one popular scam involving streaming sports.
For Personal Tech Media, this is Two Minute Tech. I’m Jim Herman.
At the professional and college level, streaming sports are big business. Almost every Division 1 conference has an agreement allowing a streaming network like ESPN or Fox to stream games not being shown on the linear networks. But now, it’s common to see games at the high school level and even younger being streamed online.
However, scammers are always ready to take advantage of those who don’t know where to go to stream a game. When a team posts about the game on social media, scammers will enter the comments posting links to watch the game. When teams stream their games on paid platforms, the scammers may advertise their links are free to watch instead. And if you post a comment online asking where to watch, you can be assured the scammers will swarm in with their scam links instead.
There are two possible outcomes if you try to watch using one of these links.
First, the scammer could be grabbing the stream and re-streaming it, but it’s often poor quality and it may come with bonuses like malware.
Second, there may not be a stream at all, but the scammer will use the promise of one to steal information.
So don’t trust streaming links on social media and stick to the major streaming platforms. A platform that no one has ever heard of will almost always be a scam platform.