In a semi-detached house on the outskirts of London, a man using the name 'David' sells access to live football matches from around the world for £50 a year. His method is an Amazon Fire Stick, usually a £40 device that normally hosts Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, YouTube and iPlayer, but which David has altered to run an app that unlocks thousands of premium channels.
The sale is anonymous and the delivery digital: a message on Facebook or WhatsApp, a PayPal transfer, and a fake login that unlocks live football at a fraction of the usual cost. David, who is not using his real name, said if Premier League TV companies were not so greedy, there would not be an issue. He said that if police knocked on his door, he would tell them to get lost, and that they would have no proof of him having a subscription, since he would simply deny streaming.
David uses a modified Fire Stick himself and supplies about a dozen to friends for extra cash. He typifies the millions of people tempted into the illegal market by rising subscription costs and the promise of instant access. It is a thriving trade in the UK, with digital piracy costing the economy up to £7billion, according to a study by the Economic Statistics Centre of Excellence.
Sky Sports pay billions of pounds to screen the Premier League and have their own in-house team to crack down on piracy.
For the past decade, a shadow war has been under way, led not just by police but by specialist private investigators and sports TV rights holders who treat digital piracy as organised crime. The Premier League's broadcasting rights were collectively worth £9.2billion in domestic and international deals last year, sold across Asia, North America, the Middle East and Europe. Sky Sports and the League have their own in-house teams dedicated to tackling the problem.
Jail terms for Fire Stick sellers
In July, 36-year-old Stephen Woodward was jailed for three years after making £1.1million from three illegal streaming sites over a seven-year period. He spent the money on designer clothes, jewellery, holidays and a Jaguar F-Type V8 coupe worth £91,000, and held the £1.1million across 15 different bank accounts. His brother, Christopher Woodward, received £126,000 derived from sales of the illegal streaming websites.
In a separate case in November last year, Jonathan Edge was jailed for three years and four months for selling Fire Stick devices he reconfigured to allow people to illegally stream Premier League matches, which he advertised on Facebook. He had ignored multiple warnings about the activity, which the judge treated as an aggravating factor in sentencing.
Thanks to broadcasters like TNT Sports, the Premier League is a global business. Last year the league's broadcasting rights were collectively worth £9.2billion.
How the devices are sold
A search on Facebook for a login to access illegal sports streaming brings up hundreds of posts. On a group called Fire Stick Streaming, which has 3,000 members, one advert offers "worldwide 24,000 channels with all the sports channels," explaining that buyers download an app to the device before being sent guidelines and a username and password. The comments underneath are filled with replies asking how much it costs or praising the service.
David said the setup is not particularly hard. He said a Fire Stick, which costs around £60, needs a certain app downloaded from the Amazon app store, along with a fake username and password bought from him to access the subscription. He warned that unless it is bought from someone trustworthy, the access could stop after a week. He also offers a free 48-hour trial.
There are several ways to get access. Buyers can pay an illegal streamer to remotely modify the software on a Fire Stick, buy one that has already been modified and is ready to plug in, or pay for a username and password to log into an app that instantly unlocks every live game. Reporters tested this last route themselves. After contacting a seller on WhatsApp on a friend's recommendation, a few messages resulted in the seller providing PayPal details for a £50 payment.
Once paid, the seller provided instructions for reconfiguring a Fire Stick bought on Amazon to download third-party apps outside the official Amazon App Store, along with a username and password. After downloading the app and entering the login details, access to dozens of sports channels worldwide was unlocked, including Sky Sports, TNT Sports and ESPN.
The investigators tracking pirates
FACT, the intelligence-led investigation service whose logo appears at the start of many blockbuster films, represents the UK's pay-TV broadcasters and rights owners. The Premier League and Sky have their own investigators too, but have been FACT clients for the past 18 years.
Since 2017 the Premier League has used High Court-ordered blocking injunctions to force UK internet service providers to take down illegal streams in real time. During the 2024-25 season alone, more than 600,000 illegal streams were blocked or removed by the League's in-house team, supported externally, with each stream potentially accessed by multiple users. Internationally, the League has partnered with authorities in Asia, including last month's "Boot Out Piracy" campaign in Thailand, supported by players including Martin Odegaard and Dan Burn, which highlighted the legal risks along with the malware and scams often hidden behind illegal streams.
Arsenal's Martin Odegaard was among the players who fronted the Premier League's "Boot Out Piracy" campaign in Thailand.
Security experts warn that modified streaming devices frequently come preloaded with third-party apps outside official app stores that can carry trojans or spyware, or let attackers access home network devices to harvest personal or banking information.
FACT chairman Kieron Sharp said the organisation could be likened to a mini police force because it is intelligence led. Reporters visited FACT's west London office, where hard drives and phones wrapped in plastic sit in a secure room only three employees can access. The office is split in two, with one half resembling a typical workspace and the other looking like a postal depot, with shelves holding parcels of seized kit sent from police forces across the country.
FACT, seen here visiting the home of an illegal streamer, represents the UK's pay-TV broadcasters and rights owners.
Building a case from digital evidence
Sharp said FACT carries out its own computer forensics, and when working a case with police, takes on the forensic work from seized computers and provides it back to police as evidence. He said FACT has built bespoke software and search algorithms that trawl social media, message logs and device storage for clues, sometimes in the native language of the person under investigation.
An unnamed investigator described feeding the systems with search terms known to appear, such as the stream name, subscription title or admin usernames, to let the software surface leads. He said a common search term is "illegal," noting that suspects are often surprised at how frequently they message others with phrases like "this is illegal" or "we need to be careful as it's illegal."
Sharp explained that if a seized computer holds three terabytes of data, investigators can never search all of it, so they concentrate on known terms such as the name of the stream, the subscription being sold, the names of people involved, and sometimes a customer database. FACT matches messaging threads to payment receipts, server logs and the IP addresses that delivered feeds, which can reveal resellers, overseas suppliers and customer lists.
Sharp said the complexity comes from the number of people involved, many of whom work together without ever meeting and remain faceless online, meaning investigations can extend from one person to dozens and take a long time to build because evidence is spread across multiple people, devices and jurisdictions. Once compiled, FACT takes the evidence to its partners, including the Premier League, broadcasters such as Sky, and often the police, who carry out the raids.
A live football match is believed to draw tens of thousands of viewers to illegal streams.
Around 59 per cent of UK Fire Stick owners admit to using the device to watch illegal streams.
Fees paid by organisations to FACT can each exceed £500,000 annually, depending on factors including the number of private prosecutions. Sharp said the Crown Prosecution Service and police often lack the specialist technical teams needed for long, complex intellectual property cases, so rights holders such as the Premier League fund private prosecutions instead. He said that once the CPS and police approve, FACT engages a specialist solicitor and counsel it has worked with on previous cases, and said he could not think of a case in the last 15 years where the prosecution had lost.
A global piracy crackdown
Sports broadcasting is a huge global industry, with the total value of media rights passing £44billion last year. Last month the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment, an anti-piracy coalition powered by the Motion Picture Association whose members include the world's largest broadcasters, teamed up with police in Egypt to shut down StreamEast, described as the world's biggest destination for illegal live sports streaming, which had been visited more than 1.6 billion times in the past year. According to the Alliance, traffic to StreamEast's various domains originated primarily from the UK, US, Canada, the Philippines and Germany.
Motion Picture Association chief content protection officer Larissa Knapp said it took about a year to identify where the operators were based. She said the StreamEast brand functions like Xerox or Kleenex, a name used generically by different operators with no trademark attached. Knapp, who spent a little over 27 years as an FBI agent before taking her current role, said the digital breadcrumb trail is much easier to follow than it used to be.
Sunny Kanda was jailed for two years earlier this year for selling what was described as "dodgy" Fire Sticks.
Knapp said phones collect and transmit an enormous amount of data, from geolocation information embedded in photos to websites visited and comments left, which investigators can stitch together to work out where a person is located.
In Spain, La Liga has its own in-house team of around 50 people split across departments including lobbying and legal action, operating from global offices including Mexico, Argentina and the UAE, with a Saudi Arabia office next planned. Rather than hiring an organisation like FACT, La Liga carries out its investigative and legal work itself. It is understood to lose more than £525million a year to piracy. Both La Liga and the Premier League are understood to share intelligence with each other, while La Liga has tried to engage Serie A and the Bundesliga in the fight against pirates, though those leagues are said not to treat the issue as as much of a priority, allocating fewer resources to it.
The risk for ordinary fans
For rights holders, the goal is to make piracy riskier, harder and less profitable. But for ordinary fans, the dangers are often invisible. Joe, a 70-year-old sports fan from south Glasgow, learned that the hard way. Retired, with subscriptions eating into his pension, he relied on his grandson Paul to set up an illegal Fire Stick, giving him access to all the top leagues for £70.
As he settled down to watch a Saturday match, Joe noticed a commotion outside his building. Police were carrying out a raid, and in a panic, believing they were coming for him, he ripped the Fire Stick from the TV and flushed it down the toilet.
For people like Joe, piracy comes with unseen risks and a constant shadow of enforcement.
The knock never came. Police were raiding another flat in the building. Joe, who is not using his real name, lost the £70 he had paid for the device, but returned to paying for official subscriptions, accepting the cost for the peace of mind that comes with lawful access.
