Police send 'we will arrest you' warning to illegal Sky Sports streamers with 'dodgy' firestick users on rise

Police are shoving stern warning letters through the doors of 'dodgy' firestick sellers as the nationwide crackdown on bootleg streaming continues.

Cops said the amount of people in the UK who are illegally streaming Sky Sports and other premium content has gone 'through the roof' in recent months.

Officials have been tightening up on the use of IPTV and illegally modified Fire TV sticks since last year, but are now 'looking at other tactics' to stamp the trend out once and for all.

The head of the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit at the City of London Police, Emma Warbey, explained that authorities are ready to arrest those who continue to flout the law despite repeated warnings.

(Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

She explained that most Brits have been able to use their dodgy firesticks without fear of being led away in handcuffs because officers are going after 'resellers and the people at the top of the tree' in organised crime groups.

"We always follow the money and go for the bigger organised crime groups and the bigger organised crime networks," the detective chief inspector told the Financial Times.

Warbey explained that although a lot of people who tune into their shows via jail-broken firesticks think it's a victimless crime, they aren't exactly right.

"Those criminals are using that money, your hard-earned money, for lots of different things, usually drugs, certainly forced labour, people trafficking, huge amounts of other criminality that you’re feeding into," Warbey said.

"So it isn’t a victimless crime."

The police have been using 'cease and desist' letters to spook lower-level sellers who are flogging the illegal TV services, she said.

'Cease and desist' letters are being sent out by cops, Warbey said (Getty Stock Photo)

And apparently, these notices warning that they will be slung into the cells seems to have been 'very effective' so far.

Warbey continued: "We are basically saying, ‘We know what you’re doing, this is the law that you’re breaking, and if you carry on, we will come and arrest you'.

"If you were a 22-year-old doing it from your bedroom and the police turned up, that’s a huge impact. We can’t arrest everybody in the UK that’s doing it. So we’re trying to look at other tactics."

The top cop said that because the use of dodgy firesticks is 'so prevalent in the UK', especially amid the cost-of-living crisis, it's 'really hard' to stop people from using them.

However, she reckons that a host of users don't actually realise that they are handing over their personal details to organised crime groups and fraudsters when signing up for a shady firestick.