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This story was reported by Indicator, a publication that investigates digital deception, and co-published with the Guardian.
It was Thursday morning in America and something didn’t look right in the highlights of the Club World Cup match between Manchester City and Juventus.
The video in front of me was the top result on both YouTube and Google Search’s video tab for the game in Orlando. More than 700,000 people had already watched the best moments of the riveting 3-2 matchup. And yet, footage showed City head coach Pep Guardiola all bundled up in a puffer jacket ill-suited to humid Florida summers.
On a couple of occasions, the commentators on the video referred to the Juventus goalkeeper as Martin Dúbravka. He actually plays for Newcastle, a totally unrelated team that wears a black-and-white jersey similar to that worn by the Italian side.
Oh, also? The match wasn’t on until several hours later.
The Club World Cup is the controversial brainchild of Fifa president Gianni Infantino, pitting 32 clubs from around the world in a replica of the World Cup played by national sides. Attendance numbers have been so-so, but the money at stake is huge. Crucially, online interest has been strong. Globally, Google searches for the tournament have dwarfed those for Donald Trump, even on the day the US president announced America would bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities.
YouTube has long failed to keep fake highlights and livestreams of football games off its platform. But these have typically been recreated from video games, making them easy to spot as soon as you’ve opened the video.
Now, a group of gaming creators based in Egypt developed a winning formula that combined repackaged clips from old games, obsessive interest in star players like Lionel Messi, and data voids, to get clicks and ad revenue.
Messi’s crazy hat-tricks
Earlier this year, the Egyptian gaming creator Mohamed Reda started posting highlight reels of the MLS team Inter Miami on his YouTube channel Reda Bow. These videos always promised a “Crazy Hat-Trick” by eight-time Ballon d’Or winner Lionel Messi and atypical score lines like 9-3 or 7-4. Like the Man City v Juventus highlights above, the clips were in reality just medleys of old goals. Reda Bow’s fake highlights did increasingly well: videos posted in April got 40,000 to 60,000 views but by June his videos were being seen 300,000 times. Then came the Club World Cup.
Reda and two other Egyptian gaming creators started posting the same templated highlights across several YouTube accounts they managed. They focused on the buzzier games that featured Messi or top European teams like Manchester City and Real Madrid.
Crucially, they posted the fake highlights 24 to 48 hours before the matches started. There was little competition for video content about the game before the game. The channels were also verified and had hundreds of thousands of subscribers. The content was fresh and seemingly authoritative, so Google and YouTube’s algorithms ranked it highly. So what if the videos defied not only the time continuum but also basic math by promising a “Messi Hat-Trick” even when Inter Miami had only purportedly scored two goals.
The operation’s takeover was absolutely comprehensive – just look at the Google Search video tab results for three CWC matches held last week. Videos from the Egyptian creators appear in the top four slots across every game, each with a slightly different scoreline for games that had yet to be played.
The scheme worked. Collectively, 30-odd videos pushed out by the trio were seen 14m times over two weeks.
All of the channels were monetized and ran ads for everything from Chase and B&H to Grubhub and Spectrum. Ironically, the videos also made money from ads for tickets for Club World Cup matches. (Fifa ignored multiple requests for comment.)
Because no deep dive into scams is complete without some AI garbage, the videos also ran ads for questionable diets fronted by a synthetically edited Oprah Winfrey (and many other AI-generated personas).
The hundreds of comments on the videos fall into two categories. About 40% of users don’t appear to recognize the deception and post enthusiastic remarks about Lionel Messi or putdowns of his archnemesis Cristiano Ronaldo.
The remainder call out the fact that the highlights aren’t real. One despairing viewer wrote “can’t believe 800k+ people clicked on this and the game has not happened yet.“ My personal favorite is a user who wrote “You are very good at making hundreds of thousands or millions of moths come to watch.” (I’m assuming it sounds even better in the original Thai.)
All of the videos in this scheme included a few minutes at the end that showed the channel owner playing a video game like eFootball.
After the games falsely represented in the videos were played, the creators updated the title to the actual score. When view growth started slowing down because interest in the game faded, they trimmed the entire highlights element out of the video and left only the final clip of them playing the video game. This bait-and-switch served to both drive ad revenue and juice up historical numbers on the channel for newcomers.
I reached out to YouTube about the videos and was acknowledged on Friday. By that evening, the platform had removed all videos under its policies against spam, deceptive practices and scams. It also terminated all the channels involved but by the time of publication had not gotten back to me on the motivation. At least one fake highlight reel with almost 1m views was still live, however.
The fake highlights scheme was juicy enough that several other YouTube channels got in on the fun, scraping the Egyptians’ fake highlights or making some of their own. (Some of this stuff also made it on TikTok, collecting millions of views there.)
The videos appear on channels whose purpose is entirely unrelated to football – including cooking, fishing, farming and bird breeding channels. I assume these are old accounts taken over by a scam operation, but I haven’t had time to dig any further. Here are some pigeon videos in case that’s your thing.
So what?
The stakes here appear lower than the average Indicator story about deceptive behavior online. Viewers who fell for these videos may have been a little disappointed to realize what happened. At a stretch, some may have even gambled one way or another based on the videos.
But if a user didn’t know what time the game was on, failed to recognize the outdated spliced clips, and went on to comment “MESSI” underneath the videos, they probably weren’t in the market for sophisticated football analysis anyway.
YouTube and its advertisers definitely lost some money from this deceptive operation, but it’s hard to feel too bad for either of them.
What matters here is less the fake content itself than the behavioral deception that enabled it to succeed.
On one of the most searched topics of the moment, a group of young YouTube creators were able to outwit Google’s ranking and moderation and surge to the top of results. By trimming videos after publication, they also showed the vulnerability of a functionality that can very easily be abused for more nefarious purposes – for instance, posting incendiary remarks to drive referral traffic from other platforms then trim them out in time to avoid getting flagged for any policy violation.
For what it’s worth, Manchester City actually trounced Juventus 5-2.
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Suzi Ragheb provided research support and translation of one of the videos in Arabic.
