The Dirty Business Model of World Cup Spammers

Are you falling prey to world cup scam websites

The World Cup, like many other live sporting events, has become a major target for spammers. A quick search to find a place to watch the World Cup final online and you will quickly run into site’s full of pop-ups, fake video feeds, dodgy survey’s that ‘unlock’ live feeds, and subscription services to pirated content that is already available for free online.
You do not need to be a victim of these dirty underground spam websites to watch the World Cup online. Here’s a list of safe World Cup live streams and the epic Netherlands vs. Spain final.

Its looking to be a very exciting game, and the female fans in the World cup are looking pretty hot too.

To those in the know about online marketing you will probably be familiar with how these ‘watch online scams’ work.

CPA Survey Scams

A popular scam is where the scammer puts up a blog containing the live feed for the World Cup (or any sporting event, movie or TV show). The video might not even work, and often it doesn’t, but before you can watch the video you’ll see a pop-up asking you to fill in a survey to unlock the content.

These surveys are run by dodgy unethical marketing companies that will ask for your email address and contact details to spam you with, and the survey itself will often just be asking you to complete certain offers (like signing up for a DirecTV subscription) in order to win a prize, and the conditions to win that prize are often extremely difficult, meaning its rare for anyone to actually win the prize.

There’s nothing really wrong with such surveys, you give your contact details and sign up for some cheaper offers to win something of more value, but in the majority of cases it is not made clear how difficult it really is to win, and how much spam you will get in your inbox as a result, and the survey itself is designed to trick and confuse people.

Then there’s the fact that after filling in these surveys, which can take over an hour, the live feed you wanted to watch may not even work in the first place. The owner of the site will be making about $1 (paid by the CPA network) off everyone who submits their email address to complete the survey.

It may surprise you but I suspect there are millions of dollars made every month by the spammers getting $1 for these CPA scams, the CPA networks themselves, and the marketing companies behind the surveys. People are throwing up these spam ‘watch online’ blogs in mass, and throwing up more spam to promote them. The traffic is huge and the major Search Engines aren’t too hot at filtering out the spammers from those generally offering ways to watch something online.

Paid Internet TV Services

There are official and legitimate paid internet TV services out there which will give you access to sports games, movies and TV shows. However, the majority of these ‘Watch Satellite TV on Your PC’ are just providing access to pirated content that is otherwise available for free.

In some cases they may have made the pirated videos easier to access, but usually no better, and sometimes worse, than the free pirate TV sites like ATDHE. To make matters worse these paid internet TV services will have lies in the sales copy such as stating all channels are HD when they are not, hidden recurring fees, and fake endorsements. There’s nothing new about these, I first came across them in 2004.

Fake Videos

In order to build additional traffic to their websites these scammers are routinely posting fake videos onto YouTube and other video sharing sites. In the case of the World Cup they may post highlights of a match or the full game.

However, when you watch the video you may be lucky just to see a few still pictures and a notice to go to their website to watch the full video.

Don’t Be Tempted

You may be tempted by the large amount of money that these scammers might be making. However, be warned it is a bad business model to be part of for several reasons:

• The easy money was made years ago before lots of people realized they could make money this way. When you are reading about it on a blog it is too late, it is now very competitive. Just look at the amount of ‘watch online’ spam in Google search results.
• Legitimate services and quality free pirate TV websites are squeezing out the scammers.
• The spammers are liable to be sued by the rights holders of the video for a serious amount of money and could face prison sentences in severe cases.
• People are becoming more wise to the scammers.
• They overly rely on Google, who are constantly working to remove spam and scams from its search results.

You can put effort into making a legitimate business that helps people, make more money doing it, and not have to worry about breaking the law or making people’s lives harder.