More than 40,000 people thought the replays of the soccer video games were illegal streams from the 2022 World Cup.
Thousands of people who thought they were watching pirated streams of the World Cup in Qatar were in fact watching pixelated replays from famous soccer video game FIFA 23.
More than 40,000 people in France alone fell for the trick, which involved illegal streaming sites linking to YouTube channels which were emitting replays of FIFA 23 matches, but using headlines such as “Live Germany- Japan on 23/11 Group E World Cup 2022″, which did indeed correspond to that actual match at the World Cup (which Japan won by the way!).
Illegal streams of FIFA 23 had Vietnamese commentary
Incredibly, the streams in question also had commentary in Vietnamese of the FIFA 23 match, but far from making the viewers more suspicious, it only added to the belief that this was an illegal stream, being captured from Vietnam.
“Until I saw the comments in the chat, and the close ups of the faces of the players I didn’t realise these were replays of FIFA 23 matches,” said one of the viewers after admitting to having been duped.
According to VNExpress, a Vietnamese outlet, this is in fact a standard trick used by pirate pages to earn “hundreds of dollars” during a World Cup match, just by playing FIFA 23. In Vietnam, where connections are often poor and users are used to poor quality images, they are less likely to realise it’s a pixelated video game rather than just a bad stream of a real game.
foot_ball
30
When you realize you were watching Fifa world cup live then find out that it is Fifa23 live game😅😅
maturidikxith
14
messi fans seeing messi pic
Keney_G
9
It's people that don't watch ball often that falls for things like that.