Comment by pavel_lishin
5 hours ago
> generic TV boxes that promise unlimited content streaming for a one-time fee
I don't want to blame the purchasers of these things - who are some of the victims - but at the same time, it does seem like a Too Good To Be True situation.
I have an elderly client who sends me links of stuff to buy all the time. One day it's one of these streaming sticks, the next day it's half-price stamps, and I tell her every time, please don't buy this stuff. And yet she does anyway, as if I was almost being mean and saying no just to say no.
So yes, I do want to blame the purchasers of these things, sometimes. To prove her point that her stamps were legitimate, she mailed me a card using one of her half priced (but likely fake) stamps and it made it through!
Perhaps they grew up in a time/environment where "if it was that bad they wouldn't be allowed to advertise it", and they're still using that old calibration?
My falther-in-law was less that and more, if I can get away with it, it's actually legal. Many know their fake, and do it because they can get away with it.
That was his justification for a satellite descrambler, they're sending me the signals, obviously I'm allowed to.
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I think that's a default for a lot of the older (and some of the younger!) generation, same goes for news and media. They grew up in a time where there was a practical barrier to publishing and (largely) laws behind you doing it.
So they trust literally everything they read. I still don't think my folks can fathom you can spin up a very real looking newspaper website with fake articles in about 10 minutes.
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> time/environment where "if it was that bad they wouldn't be allowed to advertise it"
like cigarettes?
Of course, what they're missing is that laws are for poor people.
Amazon will be notified they sold something illegal and will take it down and ban the seller who will immediately launch a new store under a new name.
The purchaser, on the other hand, will be fully liable for whatever horrible thing they bought.
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What is your line of work, if I may ask?
Half priced stamps work though, and nobody is going to prosecute grandma for counterfeiting postage stamps.
Yes they do. USPIS does not f around
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> half-price stamps
Who is selling half-price stamps?
#1 How big is your potential market? It's people still mailing things from home, who haven't figured out how to do postage on their computer.
#2 Of the population in #1, it's those who find real stamps so expensive that it's worth bothering with discounts.
#3 Of the population in #2, it's those who would want to buy something fraudulant (or not know better) and who would want to risk using it.
#4 Considering the size of the #3 population, how many stamps do they use in a month?
#5 What is your margin on a half-price stamp? You have to pay for advertising, printing (we're talking a profit margin under $1), packaging, and your own time, but at least shipping is free!
Then again I used to torrent everything under the sun and it actually rocks to have every tv show, movie, game ever released for free forever.
So is it greed? Yes, but I did it too so now that its more accessible I cannot really blame people.
Why should anyone assume a product being sold by (or at least on) Amazon, the latest retailer in the country, is an illegal device?
It’s not like they’re buying these things out of a car trunk in a dark alley. These retailers need to be held liable for selling these things. If they sell this stuff, why not illicit drugs?
If they are unable to maintain control of 3rd party sellers, then they should end the 3rd party seller program. It has done nothing but damage Amazon’s reputation, and it just keeps getting worse.
> it does seem like a Too Good To Be True situation
It's difficult to judge the price of media products. We have legal music streaming services that charges you an album's worth of money a month and lets you listen to millions of songs. You can pick up old AAA games for less than ten bucks. I'd say when people say that price tag, they don't think they get scammed into being a part of a botnet. They think the device manufacturer cut a good deal with the media rights holders.
OTOH - TV, radio, and YouTube are all unlimited and free. Why not streaming?
There are lots of people alive who grew up during the days of broadcast TV and radio. I get why they might not understand the difference.
There are a ton of legitimately free IPTV streams. You can watch them through most media players like VLC without having to download anything shady.
https://github.com/iptv-org/iptv
Ok but have fun explaining that to the average person. Buying a dongle is easier than installing software or typing URLs into their TV ("my TV doesn't even have a keyboard").
To most people IPTV is a bunch of gibberish letters, indistinguishable from the gibberish brands on Amazon. Someone's grandma from Colorado doesn't deserve to get scammed because she didn't research the acronyms.
That is chock-full of pirated content.
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Two things:
- How are these "legitimately free"? For example AMC is a commercial TV channel and as far as I know, they don't offer free streaming. Same goes for MGM, FilmBox etc.
- Strictly speaking this isn't IPTV, it's just web streams. IPTV is usually delivered via multicast (MPEG-TS/RTP/RTSP streams, over UDP mostly).
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Most people who buy these want to watch free movies, sports streams, etc that aren't on OTA or free services
The streaming services have fractured and taken so many movies off their service so much that it is too hard for most people to figure out where that show/movie can be found.
From a link above to the story on darknetdiaries:
> For Pokemon, there is a website that tells you how to watch this. You start off on Netflix, then swap over to the Pokemon streaming service, which is the only place that has Season 2, then swap over to Prime Video for Seasons 3 through 5, swap to Freevee, then Hoopla. Season 13 is only on Amazon, though. Then swap to Tubi, then Hulu, then Roku channel, and then finally back to the Pokemon streaming, and then Netflix. Easy.
That's 8 different streaming services to view one series.
Yeah, isn’t this a classic kind of scam the would-be scammer situation? If you think there’s some way to buy one cheap device and somehow get around subscribing to streaming services[1], then of course you’re going to be in a market with fraudsters…
[1] Can someone explain what the theory of the product is here? It sounds like they’re marketing these things as ways for the customer to commit fraud, for example by connecting to someone else’s login. How else would the customer expect to be able to get free Netflix or whatever?
It may be the case that these devices are front-ends for pirated content that's hosted in various places. They're not streaming it from Netflix servers. It's content similar to that offered by Netflix and other streaming services, pirated by someone else, and hosted by someone else for streaming by anyone who can figure out how to find it.
I had a streaming piracy site that I went to federal prison for. I can chime in on these people.
It's worth separating the two populations:
My users had money and had considered legal subscriptions. They paid me because the legal product was worse—in my case, sports blackouts, a bunch of different apps, etc. They knew what they were buying into and they had weighed the risk. I can tell you right now some of my former users have bought into this market.
Then there's the unwitting: a person buying one of these devices at a too-good-to-be-true price is treating it as a hardware purchase from Amazon, where the actual monetization isn't inferable from the listing. Calling it too good to be true assumes the buyer can see what shit they're standing in. They can't. There's no visible market here. It's just a product page with reviews.
To add to this: the proxy exit is exactly why these cost so little. Demand for residential IPs is booming (check some of the proxy subreddits to see what I mean).
The ironic part is that there's a chance the person who bought one of these boxes to watch pirated sports was the exit node I was using to acquire the feeds in the first place.
If you offered most people free streaming for a $37 USB stick but directly told them it would be faking ad clicks when the TV is off, would any of them really care?
Maybe they wouldn't care about the ads but the residential proxy is another story. I'm sure lots of problematic stuff goes through that and you take the risk of being associated with it.
No, and that's is the root of the problem. The buyer is happy and so is the seller. They don't care to understand what they're allowing and everyone is allowing it to happen.
I wouldn't use a device like this for a lot of reasons, but the fact that what they are doing might be taking advantage of the incredibly predatory digital advertising system is neutral to positive for me, if I'm being fully honest.
If they were using the system to rip off random people, I'd be 100% against it, if they are fucking Google and the giant corps that advertise with them, ehh.. not my problem and can't be assed to care. Google is not a positive force in the world. Hasn't been for many years.
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> They don't care to understand what they're allowing
If you told normal people that they could get free content with a TV streaming stick that would also constantly fake clicks on AI generated websites to screw advertisers over, they would think of it as a bonus. Also it would make them trust the stick more (fallaciously), because they would know how the people who sold it were getting paid.
They're just meeting the standards American society has set.
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I know a few people who buy these, and they kind of know what they're doing. They just try and not think about it too hard.
It reminds me of the saying: "It Is Difficult to Get a Man to Understand Something When His Salary Depends Upon His Not Understanding It".
If these people thought about it for a few minutes, they would understand, but they choose not to, as ignoring it is too advantageous.
I admit I was tempted, as the price of all streaming services goes up, and services become more and more fragmented. During the same period where I have not had a raise.
In the 90s, there was a cottage industry selling CDs of bootleg software at swap meets and flea markets. A guy my dad knew was almost condescending to anyone who paid for software despite having been hit by viruses multiple times because it was so much cheaper. Even having to deal with a client(!) who naively called the vendor support only to be informed that they hadn’t actually purchased a license wasn’t enough to get him to resist that savings.
Uhh, I have an extended family member, who not only uses it, but now also tries to get other people to get into it. Since I was familiar with this practice ( and the issues it makes worse ), I noted those to him in an attempt to both politely decline and, hopefully, spare him, and society, some future problems. Without going into any identifying details, he didn't take it well ( and I don't think I got on my high horse ).
Anyway, I think some level of blame is warranted.
According to the Darknet Diaries podcast episode "Superbox", some of these devices are sold via multi-level marketing schemes, which would explain why there are random individuals selling these, collecting a commission for each device sold. Which is why the person you mentioned is unhappy when someone points out the problems with these devices.
Maybe, but if they're a not-very-tech savvy older person buying this, they probably remember shows being free from over the air antennas and may think it is something like that.
> they probably remember shows being free from over the air antennas
you are aware broadcast TV never ended?
Yes, in fact I have an antenna and a HDHomeRun nestled in my attic to record over the air shows that I occasionally consume.
But, I think it's far more common for people to have a TV service today, perhaps since comcast and their ilk push hard the TV/phone/internet bundle, and gone are the years when everyone would fiddle with the antennas on the back of their TV to get the right reception.
I watch TV over an antenna, shows are free still
I used to know someone doing this. They said they know it is too good to be true, but they hate corporations and it's their little way to stick one in.
It sounds like scam
Well now I want one
Stremio+TorBox are the two words. ($3/month)
That's not what these things are. They come preloaded with apps that stream pirate broadcast streams and on-demand servers operated out of China.
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It could be possible, I haven't done the math though.
Stremio +Torbox is $3/month and they can probably share 10+ households on one TorBox account so it could work out. The seller could just stop paying the TorBox subscription at whatever point and they have an incentive to do so.