Fake video scam sites pop up after ICF Ocean Racing Champs

I'm completely gobsmacked.  

I fight almost every day against spammers trying to dump their crap on the forum, but I never expected what happened yesterday and is still happening today on the Facebook page.

It started on Tuesday.  I'd asked the ICF Ocean Racing World Champs organisers for the link to the tracking for the race - they hadn't made it clear whether they'd have streaming video or tracking.  Then a post went up on the Surfski Scotland Facebook page with a link to a live streaming page.  I quickly reposted it all over Facebook, inserted it into the two articles on the event on this website and I also posted it on a bunch of whatsapp groups here in South Africa.

And then I clicked on the link.  Only to find that it was a scam site, designed to steal your credit card details and trick you into a monthly "subscription".  Like a complete arse I signed up - in spite of my instincts screaming at me to stop...  

Having confirmed the badness (and having cancelled my credit card as a precaution), I deleted all the posts - and set about trying to find the source of the link.  Turned out that two scammers had dropped the links into the "Recommendations" section of the event's Facebook page.  Incredible.

It took a while to get hold of the organisers who were busy organising the event!  And in the meantime, others had started to share it and I spent a few hours chasing the shares down, luckily before it had gone viral.

Eventually the race organisers did see my frantic messages and deleted the links on their page (the scammers tried doing the same thing on the Surfski.info Facebook page too).  

But this morning, they're back - more comments on posts on the page, with the links to the dodgy website.  Infuriating.

I suppose you could say that it's a back-handed compliment that a surfski event should be considered worth the trouble of mounting a scam campaign - but I'm amazed, does this happen on other sporting events?  

If you see online offers of streaming websites for your favourite event...  be very careful before clicking on any links!