Media Subscription Scams; One to Rule Them All?

The coronavirus crisis has resulted in a spike in the use of online entertainment, be it video binge watching, 24-hour music streaming or reading all Harry Potter novels in one go…

Unfortunately, some companies seem to be benefitting from this outbreak in media-usage by offering dubious subscription services.

Nearly every day we receive complaints about several media subscription websites. The complaints range from:

·         “I never subscribed to their service or heard of this company.”

·         “I cannot cancel my subscription; they do not respond.”

·         “Why are they charging my credit card?”

·         “I signed up for $ 9.95 per month but they charge the amount every week!”

However, we discovered that most of the complaints we receive seem to come from websites which all look alike.

The Geeker.com Network: 233+ websites

We found more than 233+ websites related to Geeker. We call the network the Geeker Network, as Geeker.com received the most complaints and was already identified as a likely scam in 2018.

Geeker.com and its 233 related sites all make comparable claims and promises about their media assortment:

·         “Unlimited movies, music, books and games”, several sites.

·         “The most entertainment in one place”, Calvali.com

·         “All the games you want, anywhere you go”, Alriza.net

·         “From massive hits to rare gems to cult classics”, Hoagplay.com

·         “The best action titles, all available right here”, Axele.net

If you browse through the 233 sites, the subscription offering is the same:

·         € 42.50 per month

·         € 17.95 for a 3-month membership

·         € 13.95 for a 5-month membership

These subscription fees are considerably higher than what the market leaders are asking. Netflix is charging between € 7.99 and € 13.99 per month including a month free trail. Disney+ is charging € 6.99 per month or € 69.99 per year offering a 7-day free trail. Both companies allow you to cancel your subscription monthly.

Seeing the claims of “unlimited movies, music, books and games” and the (relatively) high subscription fee, one may expect a premium service. Instead, Scamadviser receives a lot of complaints about Geeker’s 233 group of sites. There are 95 complaints for 16 websites (see the table below), which indicates an average of 6 complaints per site or 1,416 complaints for the entire network.

Nearly all state not having subscribed, never having interacted with the website, or having subscribed for a trial and being charged the full amount.

Researching the Geeker Network

In the table below you see a small subset of the websites which seem to belong to the Geeker network. All sites have same the cookie statement, terms & conditions, and privacy statement texts. Also, the sites use the same sub-domain name structure such as “www2”, “signup”, “members”, “access” and “begin”. Finally, nearly all are hosted at Reflected Networks and using the registrar Safenames.

As you can see in the table above, the company name, phone numbers and marketing texts on the websites differ. In some cases, the same company name is used as is the case for Alexe.net, Alriza.net and Geeker.com.

We were not able to check the companies registered in the Czech Republic. The companies registered in the United Kingdom all seem to have different directors according to Companies House but the company websites again overlap to a large extent, technically and content wise. Likewise, some directors have worked for multiple of the listed companies above. For example, Mr. Parmenter previously worked for Nemobit Ltd. (which is listed on Taziaweb.com) and now is active for Primavera Media Ltd. (Slashstar.net).

Is Geeker a scam or legit?

To learn more, we subscribed to the monthly service of Caveli.com which seems part of the Geeker Network.

Once you login you indeed gain access to a large set of digital movies, books, games and music. However, there the match between promises made on the website and the actual offering stops.

 While taste is always in the eye of the beholder, our general feeling about the content offering is:

·         (Very) old: We compared the “popular” media in the different categories and most of it is from 2010 – 2013. “New media” often were from the 50’s and 60’s, probably as royalties expired.

·         Badly or little reviewed: The ratings for books on Google and Amazon were in general low while most movies were reviewed negatively.

·         Low quality: We tried to watch several movies. In general, the video quality was very poor.

·         Free?: Most of the games we identified are free to play on the Internet. However in the case you like to play them for free, ads are presented.

Below a small review of the “most popular” movies, books, games and music found on Caveli.com.

Movies

We used IMDB.com to compare movies. IMDB rates movies on a scale of 1 to 10.

Books

We used Google Book Search and Amazon to compare prices, date of publication and reviews. All books are offered as eBook.

Games

We used Google image search to find comparable games. All games are offered for free (but with advertising) on other sites.

Music

Music is offered for free on several platforms such as Pandora, Spotify and Youtube. However, none of the music offered in the “popular music” section of Caveli.com is listed in the top 100 of Spotify.

·         My Indies – Caitlyn Smith

·         Pop & Pop vocal expo – Shaan Sharma

·         Just the Hits – Jessy Green

·         Fly As Can Be – Megha Maan

·         ReggaeTown – artist Compilation

·         The Rosettas Me and … - The Rosettas

·         Danny Burke Electro… - Danny Burke

·         My Steaze – Megha Maan

Once we had looked around, we contacted Caveli.com, stating we want to unsubscribe with as reason that the content was not in line with the impression given. The offered phone number did not work properly on our VOIP line. A chat robot offered two options but none worked. On our mobile phone the chat robot did work. Also, the contact form on Caveli.com did not work properly (a restriction of 800 characters is mentioned but the actual restriction seems more like 200 characters). In the end we were able to send an email.

The reply via email was nearly immediately, and a promise was made to return the € 49,50 within 5 working days, which indeed happened. The only remark which could be made that € 1 was also deducted from our credit card without permission and was not returned.

The suspicious technical side

We put a batch of all the alleged links in the Geeker Network through our Scamadviser Analyzer which pulls up domain data. A majority of the websites were created on the same day, and all had similar IP addresses establishing that they are all on the same network. For example, for the IP address – 111.546.789.22 – the first set of numbers is for the network address and the second set for host address.

The registrant email ids seem like randomized machine-generated addresses. Another interesting aspect was that across the board, the registrar was Safenames Ltd. Can it be a coincidence that so many websites with similar content and offering were registered together on the same day? An anomaly that applies for 236 sites? Highly unlikely.

Why does Geeker get so many negative reviews?

If people can unsubscribe with relative ease, why does the Geeker Network get so many negative reviews?

It seems that the company is quite used to having chargebacks and payment discussions with its members. In its terms and conditions used on most of its websites, it states:

“We reserve the right to charge you reasonable “administrative” fees" for: (i) tasks we may perform outside the normal scope of our Services, (ii) additional time and/or costs  may incur in providing our Services, and/or (iii) your noncompliance with this Agreement (as we determine in our sole and absolute discretion). These fees may include, but are not limited to: (i) customer service issues that require additional personal time or attention; (ii) disputes that require accounting or legal services, whether performed by  or by external professional retained by  (iii) recouping any and all costs and fees, including the cost of Services, incurred by  as the results of chargebacks or other payment disputes brought by you, your bank or Payment Card processor.”.

They also prefer not to have class actions against themselves:

“You agree not to commence or participate in any class or representative action against us.”.

We asked several reviewers why they left a negative review. The overarching reply was that they had not subscribed to the service. The only cause of this we could find is that we found a dubious marketing campaign on several where you can win a Samsung phone on several of the Geeker sites.

On the first page (see above) it states that no subscription is required, however, if you continue to the second page you end-up on a paid registration page. In the small print we discover that at least 3,000 people must participate before the phone is given away or the entries receiving will be rolled over to the next draw. In other words, Caveli.com always wins as at least 3,000 people must participate and pay at least a € 32.95 membership fee. In several countries these kind of marketing campaigns are not allowed. Still, most people we asked could simply not remember ever having subscribed.

Let us look at DonnaPlay, which has about 266 reviews according to our algorithm. Users of Sitejabber have given it 202 negative reviews out of 230. The first common theme is they don’t now how they signed up (likely through a promotion ad?), and were charged anywhere between € 3 to € 30 on a recurring basis until they cancelled. Some also said they received a refund just like us, sans the € 1.

Now let’s talk about the review score our analyzer pulled up from MyWOT, Sitejabber, Google Shopping, Trustpilot and our own website. Donnaplay from above, with the most reviews scored a merely 1.2. Only four websites from the network have a perfect average review score of 5, while over 150 have are rated less than 1. The whole Geeker Nework’s average review score is 1.03, which so to say, is abysmal.

We were also able to check the Alexa ranking of these websites. At least 100 websites are ranked less than 500,000 — which indicates they are popular on the internet. This considerably increases the ambit of the likely scam the Geeker Network might be pulling.

Who is managing the network?

Why would any legit company have 233 different sites? From a branding and SEO (search engine optimization) point of few it does not make sense. Building a brand costs money while optimizing your site to be found in search engines is a huge effort which also takes a long time.

We think the strategy behind this, many of these sites are managed by others. On signup.caveli.com and several other sites of the Geeker Network, we found an “affiliate” link which invited people to register as an affiliate at downloadplayerz.com. On SimilarWeb you can see that this website is linked to by 114 websites of which most seem to be part of the Geeker Network.

Several of the Geeker sites also registered at Safe.Shop, which is another initiative of the Ecommerce Foundation. Completely different company details were provided. Alriza.net for example registered under the company name “The welfare organization for poor unemployment Nepal”. Likewise, iambmedia.com registered with company name “Asif” from Pakistan. Animamuse.net registered from Croatia and orbfun.net from Namibia. We suspect these are affiliates of the Caveli.com network.

We suspect that the original owners are Dutch for several reasons:

·         One of the phone numbers listed is always a Dutch one.

·         Some words found in the site code are Dutch such as “e-boeken” which means e-books.

·         Finally, the cancellation confirmation email was partly in Dutch.

What is next?

If not a scam, we think the Geeker Network is operating in the twilight zone. The number of consumers being confronted with a negative experience is high. On Scamadviser.com the number of consumers who have requested information about the Geeker sites is more than 155,000 pageviews (by comparison, Amazon.com has been requested 140.000 times). If you combine this with the higher number of negative reviews, it certainly is a company which needs to be monitored.

This article has been written by a scam fighter volunteer. If you believe the article above contains inaccuracies or is missing relevant information, please contact Scamadviser.com using this form.