Suspicious Facebook profiles promoting phony livestreams of an Ansonia-Seymour football game within comment threads on Facebook Tuesday.
ANSONIA — The state’s high school sports organization is warning fans not to be fooled by social media posts promising low-cost live streams of football playoff games.
CIAC Sports took to Twitter at 10:30 a.m. Tuesday with an alert about the bogus live streams, and included a screen shot of a scam post from Twitter.
John Holt, the CIAC’s director of media, said in an email Wednesday that NFHSNETWORK.com has the exclusive rights to the CIAC Tournament events (NFHS stands for National Federation of State High School Associations, and the company is part of the CBS Sports digital network). A subscription is required.
“In general, if it’s not a Tweet coming from CIAC or NFHS Network — it’s likely bogus,” Holt said via email.
The proliferation of scam sites is particularly bad on Facebook.
The “Ansonia Chargers (Ansonia Gridiron)” Facebook page warned people of the scam sites on Tuesday ahead of the Ansonia-Seymour playoff game. Within the comment thread under the warning, no less than three bot accounts posted links to scam sites.
On an unofficial Ansonia community page, two people reported they fell victim to scam sites masquerading as the real thing. Others noted the scam sites tag “official” pages, too, such as the City of Ansonia Facebook page.
Darlene Zawisza runs one of the informal Ansonia Facebook pages and, as a city employee, has the ability to post to the official City of Ansonia Facebook page. She said she had shared a phony link on those pages not realizing it was bogus because it looked like the real thing. Once she learned it was fake, she reported four pages to Facebook and blocked the page from tagging her pages.
David Diotalevi, an Ansonia native now living in California, said he signed up using a link that had been shared on Facebook. He said he entered his credit card info, but was unable to log-in to the site for which he had just registered. At first he thought it was a glitch, but then he noticed discrepancies between the various websites to which he was being diverted. The end goal seemed to be a web company trying to sell some type of fitness product.
The initial sales pitch was $1 to watch the Ansonia game, which would turn into a $56 fee the next day.
Diotalevi said the company had a working customer service line, and a representative said she was based in Greece.
It took a bit of time, but Diotalevi said he was told the “service” was canceled, but he’ll be watching his credit card transactions closely.
The scam posts keep popping up on Facebook under new accounts, despite repeated reports filed to Facebook, a company not known for scrutinizing its billions of posts per day for accuracy.
In his email, Holt noted that the Twitter scam posts tend to tag high school football players — a giant red flag.
“We and NFHS would never tag a player by his or her handle in a Tweet promoting a LIVE stream of a CIAC event,” he said.
Holt noted that these scams aren’t just happening in Connecticut — they’re all over the U.S.
An alert shared on Twitter by CIAC Sports Tuesday.
“Also, it’s important for individual schools, teams and athletic directors not to share bogus social media posts. CIAC will communicate that message to schools in advance of Sunday’s eight state semifinal games,” Holt said.
The Ansonia High School varsity football team is scheduled to play Cromwell/Portland at 12:30 p.m. Sunday at Pierson Park in Cromwell, and will most likely be available as a livestream, Holt said.
He said the public should check this website — the schedule will likely be finalized by Saturday.
