High School Athletic Spam Links No More? LHS Finally Cracks the Code.
Justin Scott | Sports Reporter
“The primary pushers of the spam were tracked down to the country of Indonesia, with the country figured out, officials could make their move in mass blocking the spammers.”
High School Sports Have Been Plagued by Spam Links Since the Pandemic
If you follow the Lowell Red Arrows Facebook page, the Lowell Football Facebook page, or other high school athletic Facebook pages, you’ve seen them. Countless spam links to obscure sketchy websites that claim to be streaming the latest Lowell High School sporting event. To the trained eye, something isn’t right. It feels a bit spammy. Not official. To the untrained eye, looking to just watch their kid, grandkid, relative, play high school sports, these links easily could pass as a legitimate streaming source. Once they put in your payment information, now your credit card and personal information is in the hands of people you don’t want. Whether you get a real stream or not at this point is irrelevant. Your computer may have malware. Your credit card information may have been stolen. Your identity may have been stolen. Now there's a real problem much worse than spam links.
These links are malicious, they’re annoying. Especially to high school administrators who for two years now have been banning countless spam accounts, deleting spam links, and countless hours spent monitoring comments to prevent an unknowing Lowell fan from being the latest victim.
It’s not just contained to Lowell. This has been a problem across the country as the NFHS Network and high school sports streaming has gained popularity. It’s spread from high schools to colleges and pro events as well. This spam attack is incredibly sophisticated and coordinated, coming from thousands upon thousands of spam accounts on Facebook, with thousands of spam websites set up. High school athletic associations have sounded the alarm across the country about the issue, but Facebook and agencies like the FBI have either been able to crack the code, or haven't gotten to it. After all, Americans lost 10.3 billion dollars to online scams last year.
The spammers will say their streams are free. They’ll tag Lowell pages. They'll even be brazen enough to comment on your comment. Within minutes of Lowell posting something on social media, they jump on the posts with up to dozens of comments. They’re good at spreading misinformation, and they’re relentless. Despite blocking hundreds of spammers in the past two years, LHS continued to get these posts on a daily basis, until just recently.
Example of spam link comments on a high school sports profile. Pages, the most common form of sports account on Facebook, can be protected by spam links, as can private profiles, but public profiles cannot protect themselves.
Lowell High School athletic officials believe they’ve solved the problem. By backtracking the profiles that posted the spam, and working through Facebook’s page support system, officials were able to determine that the country of origin of most, if not all, of these spammers was from the country of Indonesia.
A difficult decision had to be made. There’s an option on Facebook to hide your page from certain countries. The solution? A blocking feature that hid the school sports page from Indonesia. The problem is what if there’s a real person located in Indonesia still following the page? Perhaps an old exchange student. Perhaps a former Lowell graduate who had moved there? The odds and impact of that were so low, and the upside so high, the move was made.
The gambit worked. The spam links stopped late last week, and there was for the first time in two years, peace in the Facebook comments.
It’s not a problem contained to Facebook only. The posts happen on Twitter, or now known as “X”, YouTube, and Instagram too. The numbers dwarf what happens on Facebook however. So yes, we’ll have to stay vigilant. We have to be smart online. The good news is though, we’re fighting back, slowly but surely.
The only approved streams of Lowell High School sports come through NFHS Network and the MHSAA. Paying close attention to the URLs and confirming you are at mhsaa.tv or nfhsnetwork.org for now is the best way to protect yourself. They do cost money, but it's a small price to pay to watch your favorite high school team safely.
Check out the below video of how Lowell High School has mitigated spam links on their athletics pages.
