Shrewd Youtubers are taking advantage of the FIFA World Cup 2022 fever. Viewers are tricked into thinking a streamed FIFA 23 match is a low-quality pirated stream of a World Cup match. Some of these videos have collected tens or even hundreds of thousands of views.
As reported by the reader of the Vietnamese news site VNExpress, the reader found the channel when he looked for Japan vs Germany on Google. He mentioned that he saw the comments on the stream, and that’s when he got to know about it.
To make this act appear realistic, the “new PES” game football and FIFA 23 were used to replicate real World Cup games. It is not easy to trick someone with just the title of the tournament, but the channel creators dropped the quality down to 240p. The YouTube video is also disguised with the “live” red dot mark next to the descriptions.
Particularly speaking, a Vietnamese channel known as Minute90Kplus has tons of these videos. With some videos minting over 200,000 views, it looks like most people figure out the difference. The fake-looking graphics give away the show during the player close-up.
This is not the first time this trick has been used to fool people. Some of the YouTube Channels have been playing this illusion with other games too. One such example is the combat sim Arma 3. Lately, the developers of this game urged players to not stream or post such clips claiming to be real battles. Viewers should also avoid consuming pirated content.
FIFA 23: Similar act observed on English Channels
English channels were no different when it came to repeating the act. The channel Football Live, which has 1.25 million channels subscribed, aired similar watch-along fake games. Many YouTubers record themselves watching the World Cup matches to gather views too.
They try to incorporate ads in their video every 5 seconds, and sometimes, have these links attached to their streams. These links direct viewers to malicious sites which feature betting and other fake live streams. Because they display ads as soon as you click on them, these fake creators are guaranteed of earning ad revenues from viewers.
The most viewed seems to be uploaded eight days ago, garnering over 277,00 views and counting. Another move used by these channels is the use of #WorldCup2022. FIFA believes that around 3.57 billion viewers tuned into the 2018 World Cup edition. It can be seen how these YouTubers are trying to take benefit of the numbers.
Videos like these are violating YouTube’s policies on misleading descriptions and titles. Yet when you search for the sports games online, they still pop up in the results.
