A Mirror investigation has found thousands of ads from criminals on Facebook Marketplace as industry vows crackdown on illegal streaming costing it billions.
Millions of illegal streamers in the UK using modified Amazon Fire Sticks are being warned they could face prosecution for their role in funding international piracy gangs.
The warning comes from the former London detective heading the Federation Against Copyright Thefts’ fight against the multi-billion pound fraud. Growing numbers of Brits are believed to be turning to illegal TV streams but they risk ID theft, losing their credit card details to criminals and malware viruses infecting their devices. Illegal TV streaming is estimated to cost up to £21 billion a year and many of the illegal streamers in the UK are using cheap modified Amazon Fire Sticks.
We found tens of thousands of adverts for their pirate services openly posted on Facebook. Many are for doctored Firesticks which offer bundles of thousands of channels for a few pounds a month. We found a single UK mobile number being used across 800 Facebook Marketplace ads for Fire Stick “packages” for as little as £6.
Customers are urged to contact the criminals via Whatsapp and the adverts are posted by over 100 different Facebook users, all accounts created in the last few months, and located across the country, from Kendal in Cumbria to Guildford in Surrey. It points to a sophisticated scam operation that is expecting its ads could be taken down and accounts blocked.
When we contacted one seller we were offered “All Sky channels, all sports channels, all football events, Netflix, HBO, Disney +, Amazon Prime and Apple” for as little as £2.50 a month. Prices started at £35 for a six month subscription to £150 for a five-year deal. In comparison, a football fan wanting to follow all the Premier League action legally would need to pay nearly £50 a month for the cheapest Sky, TNT and Prime deals.
Our crooked seller falsely claimed their service was legal: “Don’t worry, we are providing services all over the UK.” They claimed to be from a company called IPTV, although this is just a general term for Internet Protocol Television, claiming: “It’s [an] online service to provide channels on fire stick, smart TVs, android TVs, mobile phone as well. We can provide subscriptions to other countries like Australia, USA and Canada.”
But these alluring offers have a sting in the tail. There is no guarantee the criminals will be around long enough to honour the deal. In January, a man streaming illegal TV to thousands from his residential house in Birmingham was jailed for two years. Meanwhile, criminals are harvesting the personal details of thousands, their card payment information and gaining the ability to infect their smart TV, mobile phone and laptop with malware.
Kieron Sharp, chairman of the Federation Against Copyright Theft, told us that users are also breaking the law and could be prosecuted. FACT is helping prosecute gangs like the ones we found on Facebook. In the last five years, FACT has been involved in 23 prosecutions leading to 36 criminals being jailed for an average of nearly three years each.
In January, Sunny Kumar Kanda from Halifax, West Yorks, was jailed for two years at York Crown Court for supplying modified Fire Sticks through a Facebook group with nearly 4,000 members. In December, FACT led a two-week crackdown with police from 15 forces which targeted 30 illegal services.
Kieron, a former senior City of London Police detective and former head of the economic crime team at Interpol, said: “This has been a problem forever, since the days of pirated video cassettes and DVDs. But the rise of streaming has made things easier for the criminal in the same way as it has made things easier for the legal consumer. Is it any more of a problem than it was years ago? That’s very difficult to say. There’s no complete picture of the landscape.”
The Intellectual Property Office has estimated that 6.2m Brits access illegally streamed TV and 3.9m people watch pirated live sport. Kieron added: “We have adopted the attitude over the years that we would rather not criminalise the end user.
“If we take out a gang and they have a customer database, we would normally write to the consumers on that customer list telling them ‘What you are doing is breaking the law and you will have to stop’. We would like to think that they would start paying for that content.
“But it is entirely possible that consumers could get swept up in our investigations. It would be a discussion for everybody involved in the business to see if that is an area that we would want to go down. It could happen, it really could. I would never say to any of the consumers through the messaging that we do that they are not going to get prosecuted because that just isn’t correct.”
As an indication of the possible consequences for users of these services, when 29-year-old illegal Fire Stick seller Jonathan Edge, from Liverpool, was jailed for more than three years in November, he was also sentenced to two years and three months in prison for personally accessing and viewing the pirated content he distributed, to be served concurrently.
FACT told us that watching an illegal stream was an offence under the Fraud Act 2006, with a maximum penalty of five year’s imprisonment. But there is a more immediate risk from Malware – or malicious software – that comes with doctored devices or illegal streams.
Fraudsters could raid your bank account, steal your identity and even hijack your camera and microphone. “There is a risk from using these devices, it is not just us saying this,” he explained. “People should be warned about this. There’s a real risk of having your identity stolen or similar. If you give over your credit card details, you are giving them to criminals.
“They could get access to the camera on your TV, if it has one, or microphone. There is no safety or security with what you are getting with these modified devices. Some people set them up just to get your personal details.” A recent report by Enders Analysis accused Amazon’s £25 Fire Stick of allowing “plug-and-play piracy”, with three in five who used a physical device for piracy in the last 12 months choosing the Fire Stick, according to Sky.
Amazon said it had made changes to Fire TV to make it harder to stream pirated content and that it warned customers against “sideloaded apps ”. An Amazon spokesperson said: “Pirated content violates our policies regarding intellectual property rights, and compromises the security and privacy of our customers.
“We remain vigilant in our efforts to combat piracy and protect customers from the risks associated with pirated content, which includes prohibiting apps that infringe upon the rights of third parties in our Appstore, and warning customers of the risks associated with installing or using apps from unknown sources.”