An screenshot of a Tweet containing a fake streaming link to a Clermont Northeastern High School football game.
When I wake up most mornings, one of the first things I do is check Twitter.
Usually there are a few notifications I’ve missed overnight, mentions from people sending in results or notable performances.
I noticed a few new notifications sprinkled in over the last week: Accounts pushing streaming links to events around the area.
The @ClerSunSports Twitter account was tagged in two such posts, one for a Clermont Northeastern football game and the other for a West Clermont football scrimmage.
Neither of those links were real.
As the week continued on and the official start of the season drew closer, more and more schools were tagged in those messages. Wilmington High School posted a message asking fans to be wary of those links as they were highlighting the NFHS Network’s live stream of Wilmington’s game against Ross.
Wilmington doesn’t use the NFHS Network. Their home games are streamed through CampusNation.
The day Princeton High School was slated to open the season against Anderson, an account tagged the Vikings in a tweet about a live stream of the game. Princeton’s Athletic director, Joe Roberts, warned fans that the school was unaware of that broadcast and directed them to ESP Media, the company that was actually airing the game.
The account pushing the Princeton/Anderson link now shows as suspended, but more and more of them pop up every day. Not every school is able to catch the irregularities beforehand, I’ve seen a handful of official school accounts retweet broadcast links that were anything but official.
For the sake of journalism, I followed one of the links, scanning it for malware and the like as best I could along the way. It took me to a landing page that used the NFHS Network logo and one button that brought up a page with a video player.
After a few seconds of counting down, the video player was replaced with a message informing me that I needed to subscribe to watch the contest. It then redirected me to a page asking for my personal information and a credit card number.
I bailed at that point, my desire to know what would happen next was quickly overmatched by not wanting to have to deal with closing a bank account. But fans who aren’t as familiar with the NFHS Network or other streaming options may not make that same choice, opening themselves up to a massive headache in the process.
With the amount of schools streaming their extracurricular events on the rise, more and more fans will be vulnerable to these types of scams. The NFHS Network has been dealing with them for a while, however.
Mark Koski, the NFHS Network’s Chief Marketing Officer, said the organization has been dealing with this problem since the beginning.
“We’ve had this problem so to speak over the last eight years,” Koski said. “When we find out about it, we get it shut down right away. As streaming continues to grow, people expect games to be streamed. COVID has had something to do with that. The year that we’re in, we’re finding more of these and we just make sure that they get taken down as soon as possible.”
Koski said accounts like these can hurt the schools themselves as they direct subscription revenue away from the programs. Back when the NFHS Network first began, it was a student-operated production. Now, Pixellot automated cameras handle the production work but schools can still choose to provide on-air commentary. Selling ads during those contests is one of the ways the NFHS helps schools increase revenues.
“We provide every school two free cameras,” Koski said. “They receive a portion of the revenue for all subscribers but they get 100 percent of their advertising. If they put ads in the upper left and upper right corner, any of those ads the play-by-play announcers read, the schools get 100 percent of those.”
The NFHS has a long-term goal of airing all two million high school extra curricular events. This year, they expect to crack the one million mark. That gives spammers ample opportunity to strike, so Koski has advice for both fans and school officials.
“Double check to make sure you’re on the NFHS Network platform,” Koski said. “That’s the key. You look at some of these links and there are a bunch of letters and numbers, so make sure you’re on NFHSNetwork.com.”
If a school official catches a fake link to an event, Koski suggests reaching out to the network itself for help getting them shut down.
“We have over 200 staff members as part of our network, and if schools are curious about what’s happening feel free to reach out to us,” Koski said. “We want to make sure we’re there for schools. We’ll do any background that we need to to get things shut down. This is hurting the schools, it’s hurting the students. We want to be there for them.”
Not every school uses the NFHS Network to stream online. For instance, New Richmond streams athletic events through the NR Media Facebook page. Milford High School streams events through YouTube.
In the Southern Hills Athletic Conference, Fairfield, Lynchburg and Whiteoak use YouTube for streaming. Ripley, Fayetteville and Eastern streams are handled through the NFHS Network.
