“He was providing a service to people…there’s an element of a Robin Hood to all that.”

The criminal trial last year of Jonathan Edge provided this particularly eye-catching claim after he admitted selling modified Fire Sticks which provided illicit streams of Premier League football.

“The point should be made on his behalf that the people who would buy his products would not be people who are likely to have the money to buy a Sky subscription,” submitted his barrister Julian Nutter. “The people he would be dealing with in the Merseyside area would hardly be the same as toffs in London who would have money coming in from the City.”

It was a novel defence.

Edge, a 29-year-old from Liverpool, was jailed for more than three years for offences under the Fraud Act following a private prosecution that was brought by the Premier League.

And then last week came another prison sentence. Sunny Kanda, a 41-year-old from Halifax, was jailed for two years for brazenly using Facebook to sell modified Fire Sticks which provided access to Sky Sports, TNT Sports, Netflix, and Disney.

“The outcome serves as both a consequence for those involved in these criminal activities, and as a strong warning,” said Kieron Sharp of the Federation Against Copyright Theft, an organisation which, in collaboration with police forces across the country, launched a national clampdown last month and issued a flurry of cease-and-desist warnings.

£30 a year to watch all the sport you want

What are known as “jailbroken” or “loaded” Fire Sticks – which have been adapted to host apps that illegally stream overseas or paywalled content – have become a major UK focus in sport’s long-running war against piracy. And the flurry of concerted recent action reflects the wider scale of the threat, with 2023 research by the Intellectual Property Office estimating that almost four million people in the UK had used an illegal source to watch live sport over the previous year. A recent study of France by the regulatory body Arcom put annual losses to the sports sector from audio-visual piracy at €240 million (£200 million).

“Is it ruining our business? No,” said one insider at a prominent broadcaster. “Is it the biggest threat? Absolutely. I don’t think anyone would shy away from that.”

It is not difficult to see why. Suites of entertainment that may usually cost around £1,000 a year are going on the Fire Sticks for a one-off cash cost of as little as £30 or minimal subscription fees on internet selling sites. And that might not just include the most popular pay-TV broadcasts in the UK but football streams from abroad that break England’s traditional Saturday 3pm blackout.

A search on Google can even take you to online tutorials showing how to “unlock” a Fire Stick and “unleash the full potential…of unrestricted streaming without boundaries”.

Rivals angry at Amazon’s hackable technology

The financial stakes could hardly be higher – the Premier League’s latest domestic broadcast rights have been sold for £6.7 billion – and the authorities are determined to warn fans against the normalisation of such behaviour. It is believed that the devices have often been modified on an industrial scale by gangs who, as well as putting customers at risk of criminal sanction, are not just after your money but potentially also your online identity.

Where the most obvious UK piracy threat once came via the so-called ‘Kodi’ or ‘Android Boxes’ which could be adapted to illegally stream, the fact that Amazon Fire Sticks have become a conduit for this activity has become a source of particular tension.

Amazon, after all, are themselves sports rights-holders with their own movie studio, and there is a deep frustration inside other broadcasters that they are not urgently placing greater restrictions on the apps that their product can potentially host. Apple, for example, has a virtually closed environment for their TV boxes and it is therefore vastly more difficult to use to host technology that provides access to illegal streams. “Amazon’s Fire Stick is really easily modified,” said one broadcast executive.

Amazon says that it is providing a high-quality streaming experience “while actively promoting a streaming landscape that respects intellectual property rights and encourages the responsible consumption of content”. Their product also comes with warnings about installing apps from unknown sources.

‘You’re probably having your identity stolen’

David Ingham, whose Cognizant firm works with broadcasters and rights-holders to identify illegal streaming, stresses that the Fire Stick is simply a convenient mechanism. “It is easy for pirates to put an app on there – and it’s an app that is pointing to these websites and ripped streams that are hosted on the internet,” he says. “It could be scraping the web and just looking for the current ripped stream; it could be taking you to something that is hosted in Gibraltar, and a server that is harder to take down. It’s easy to sell. People have the infrastructure to plug it into their smart TVs, and people know how to use a Fire Stick. It’s an easy consumer device.”

Ingham believes that many average users – and indeed some middle men – do not appreciate that they are entering a world of piracy, fraud and the theft of intellectual property rather than simply buying and selling. And the belief is that crime gangs have become involved in the mass manipulation of devices at off-shore centres before selling them on to more local distributors.

Multiple sources make the comparison between piracy and drug cartels. “Piracy is absolutely organised crime,” said one broadcast executive. “The networks that sit behind it are very much like drugs – in how it filters down from very organised criminals in different countries… to you are at a party and someone knows someone who knows someone.”

It is stressed repeatedly that customers are also exposing themselves to wider threats.

“You have to think, ‘How are they funding that and why does it make sense to do this stuff in the first place?’” says Ingham. “If you go to a website and it says, ‘Pay £5 for Sky Sports for an entire season’, you are probably having your identity stolen as part of that. There’s probably malware that is being delivered to you that is monitoring you in other ways. There’s a big web behind it.”

UK’s 3pm blackout ‘good for business’

According to FACT, almost half of respondents who illegally stream in the UK say they or someone they know have been a victim of scams, ID theft, fraud or data loss. A further 41 per cent have been exposed to inappropriate content from these websites. Some of the most recent criminal cases were revealing. In May 2023, what is believed to be the world’s largest ever prosecution of an illegal streaming network saw five men receive combined sentences of more than 30 years in prison. The largest sentence of 11 years was handed down to the “prime mover” Mark Gould. Christopher Felvus was separately also found guilty of voyeurism and possessing indecent images of children.

Trading under the names, Flawless, Shared VPS and Optimal (also known as Cosmic), they had sold £10-a-month subscriptions which generated in excess of £7 million from 50,000 subscribers over the course of five years. The operation had developed apps offering Premier League matches and other content which ran on phones and smart TVs.

Prosecutor David Groome revealed that the gang had exchanged messages saying the 3pm Saturday “blackout” was “good for business”. Doug Love, the trading standards investigator who led a raid on Gould’s flat in Greenwich, south-east London – which found “20 or 30 set-top boxes linked together” in a spare bedroom – said that no one had realised “how big it was”.

There has been a big Premier League push around High Court blocking orders, which require internet service providers to prohibit access to live streams during matches, and which stopped 650,000 illegal live streams last season alone.

The broadcasters are also calling on platforms such as Meta, Google and X to remove what are often open adverts for illicit online retailers or tutorials showing people how they can modify a device. Thousands of listings for “loaded” Fire Sticks were removed from Facebook marketplace last year alone.

‘A game of cat and mouse’

The issue is also far bigger than Premier League football. Movies, TV shows, music and events such as the Oscars are also sought after by streamers, as are major sporting occasions such as the Olympic Games. Sky had a team specially designated to monitor Luke Littler in the world darts final earlier this month, with illegal streams still popping up on the internet. BeIN Sports, which broadcasts Premier League football in the Middle East and North Africa, has its own in-house team working on the issue 24/7.

Cognizant provides a real-time service to broadcasters and rights holders. If streams have gone live, it means instantly notifying platforms such as Meta and Google with screenshots and videos. The big tech companies have tools which can automatically shut down an illegal stream. Individual websites are more challenging, with enforcement usually beginning with a “cease and desist” letter.

“It’s constant – a game of cat and mouse,” said Ingham.

A further major challenge is when a sport such as Premier League football is broadcast globally, meaning the weakest link can undermine the whole ecosystem. Cameron Andrews, the legal director for anti-piracy at beIN, says that more people access pay-TV through illegal streams than legal subscription routes in the region they serve.

“Our piracy issues are off the scale compared to here [the UK],” he says. “Piracy is the competitor. We provide a high-quality product that is very reliable... alongside all the piracy services.

“It’s very much a physical market – we still have a problem that shops stock boxes that have IPTV [internet protocol tv] apps in them alongside the legitimate product.

“The great appeal is that they have everything stolen from everywhere and compiled and put in one spot. It’s a very sophisticated ecosystem that sits behind this.

“It’s global. The internet knows no national boundaries but copyright is licensed territorially. If Sky were able to wave a magic wand and stop any piracy of their content, then people would be watching it on beIN English and vice versa.”

Raids in Singapore and Sao Paulo

There is an ongoing debate about regulation and the extent to which governments and police can and should tackle the issue on an international basis. The Premier League has already supported raids in Singapore and Sao Paulo, as well as prosecutions in Thailand and Vietnam. One repeated wish among rights-holders is for internet platforms to have greater obligations to know the identity of their users, whether that is at the level of hosting providers, e-commerce platforms or social-media companies.

“The legal framework is still pretty pathetic,” says Andrews. “It is so easy to get an account and use these devices pretty much anonymously.”

He does, though, highlight significant improvements in removing illegal streams from prominent social media platforms. There is also optimism over the potential for AI to monitor and quickly identify illegal activity.

The UK remains a fragmented broadcast landscape, with Amazon Prime leaving the Premier League stage next season (but keeping Champions League games until 2027) and Sky Sports and TNT sharing the domestic live Premier League packages until at least 2029 in a deal that will include substantially more live matches (270 per season compared to 200). The Saturday 3pm blackout will also not be changing, with the Premier League and the wider pyramid still steadfast over the sanctity of that space to drive match attendances and grass-roots participation. The range of subscriptions or pay-per-view deals to follow all their favourite live action remains a frustration to some sports fans.

The greater warnings to the consumers and distributors of illicit streaming, however, has never been more stark. And, with sports governing bodies and rights holders together paying billions in tax and supporting hundreds of thousands of jobs, it is stressed that this is a crime with real, wider effects.

“If you’re supplying or using illicit streaming devices or illegal IPTV subscriptions, take this as a clear warning: you are breaking the law and risk facing serious consequences,” says the Federation Against Copyright Theft. “We will continue working with police to track down and shut down these illegal operations.”