Police shut down Score808, but its name is still pulling installs on Google Play: a score app that rides the name, with an obscure category

In 2024 October, Kenyan police took down the pirate football site score808.US, but the name "Score808" is still being searched for. In Sep 9, someone put a score app called "Score808 Live Football TV HD" on Google Play, which got 8k installs in 11 weeks and charted in the "Events" category in 14 regions. It didn't really break out; at least three same-name packages are bigger. Two things are worth a look: where this name's traffic is coming from, and why it skipped the "Sports" category and chose "Events".

A raid in Nairobi

On 2024 Oct 29, Kenya's Copyright Board (KECOBO) officers and police arrested a man in Makadara, Nairobi, who ran and hosted the pirate streaming site score808.US. The site's backend database was seized and the site went offline. Two days later, Africa's biggest pay-TV company, MultiChoice, put out a press release giving the site's scale: from 2023 October to 2024 September, 27.6M unique visitors worldwide, with over 20,000 people online at any given moment. Kenya alone accounted for 8.85M, about a third; South Africa 1.62M; Nigeria 1.15M. Users watched the Premier League, La Liga and Serie A for free, with the feeds stolen from Sky Sports and SuperSport.

This was not the first time Score808 had been hit. In December 2022, the US government had already seized a batch of domains including score808.com and hesgoal.com, and TorrentFreak reported at the time that these sites drew "millions of visits a month."

Neither seizure made the name disappear. By November 2026, sites such as score808live.tv and score808.stream were still running. On the download site Softonic, an install package called "score808 live football app" was downloaded 6,828 times that month. On YouTube there is a #score808 hashtag, and Indonesian-language titles read "Score808 langsung sekarang" (Score808 live now). The real site can't get into app stores, so whoever searches the term in the store gets picked up by someone else.

What it actually is

The large headline on the store page reads "SCORE808 – LIVE FOOTBALL SCORES & STREAMING GUIDE". Below it are scores, the league table, fixtures, starting lineups and news, plus a "TV channel guide" telling you which channel is showing which match. The key part is in the final paragraph:

We do not host, stream, own, or broadcast any live match video content.

That is, it doesn't host any match footage. The title "Live Football TV HD" paired with this disclaimer: one pulls people in, the other covers the review.

Money only comes from ads: the store listing says it contains ads, with no in-app purchases. Version has stayed at 1.0.5 since Sep 17, no updates since; 11-06,0 ratings, not a single review. Users came for free football and found only scores, so most probably watch a few ads and uninstall (inferred).

Scale

On normal days it's one or two hundred to five hundred a day. Around the match days of October 20–21, 25, 31 and Nov 4, it jumped to five hundred to a thousand three hundred a day (third-party estimate, not checked match by match).

Why it didn't pick "Sports"

This is the only slightly unusual move it made. Similar name-riding score apps almost all sit in the SPORTS category; this one picked EVENTS.

Nov 6, Indonesia's Google Play Top Free chart for Events had only 115 ranks in total. In the top 30, the others were BUSSID bus and truck mods, a DANA loan tutorial, and a Quran player; it was the only football app. With only about three thousand installs a week, it ranked #25 on that chart, and its best was #19 on November 3 and 4.

In another 13 regions (Hong Kong, Poland, Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, Vietnam, Argentina, UAE, Netherlands, Nigeria, Thailand, South Africa, Saudi Arabia), its daily rank was nearly identical: 11-06 all between 87 and 93, 10-31 all between 132 and 140. Ranks moving in lockstep across 13 countries means those storefronts show the same aggregated chart, not that real people in each country installed it (inferred). South Africa 10-29 once hit #16, then fell back to the aggregate-chart position.

On the sports chart, it sat among FotMob, Sofascore and LiveScore, apps with tens of millions of installs. On the Events chart, its rivals were bus mods. With three thousand installs a week, it was invisible on the first chart and could reach the top 25 on the second.

The person behind it: one developer account, seven name-riding packages

The developer is called VISIONCRAFT on Play, with 11-06 apps under 7 name:

Package names and titles don't match: one is called "wellness stream hub" (health) but carries Sportzfy; one is called "cinema goal" but carries CricFy. A common tactic is to pass review under a neutral name, then change the title after listing (inferred).

The biggest in this account isn't Score808 but CricFy-TV: listed in Sep 28, already 83k installs, up 42k in a week, charted in 100+ regions. Score808 is just a peripheral piece of the matrix. The account also has delisted packages: a Sportzfy package charted #8 on Bangladesh's Lifestyle Top Free in Oct 6 and is now gone from the developer page.

Cost is nearly zero: the contact email is Gmail, the privacy policy is a free-generator template, and the developer site sits on a free hosting subdomain used for app-ads.txt, the file ad networks use for verification. That suggests the money does flow through programmatic ads.

Who it's competing with: the same name, wave after wave

Packages riding "Score808" on Play have appeared nonstop since 2023: listed, pulling in users, delisted, replaced, and back again.

Another similar package lasted only 49 days. On iOS there is also a "Score808 - Sport App & IPTV", listed in January 2026, with 963 ratings.

The best-performing same-name package reached only a few hundred thousand installs and lasted about ten months. It came later and was smaller than the three live ones before it.

Where users come from

• Searched "score808" on Play: confirmed. The name is the entry point; same-name packages reaching several hundred thousand installs one after another shows this term has steady search volume.
• Event category chart: confirmed. The 14-region chart above got a bit of extra exposure.
• Match days: partly confirmed. Daily installs spiked around several match days.
• TikTok: no luck. 11-06 searched "score808" on TikTok and got empty results; the term is blocked as a sensitive word.
• X, paid ads: nothing found. No discussion on X in the last 30 days, and no sign of paid ads.

If it were you

D: worth knowing, not recommended to follow. Copying this means hanging an impersonating package under a term where three bigger same-name packages already sit; one package might bring tens of thousands of installs a year and a few hundred dollars in ad revenue (estimated), and it lasts as long as Google allows. The only transferable trick is "pick an obscure category to chart."

Who it suits: small teams already building utility or content apps looking for cheap exposure can note the "obscure category" move; people who know small-country storefronts in Southeast Asia and Africa.

Who it doesn't suit: anyone wanting to copy this package. Under the term "Score808" there are already predecessors with 368k and 235k installs, and you'd rank fifth or lower. Anyone who cares about their developer account: impersonation plus misleading titles violates two Google Play policies, and one flagged package can drag down the account's other apps. Anyone building a long-term product.

How to do it: don't borrow someone else's name, borrow two ideas instead. First, find terms where the real brand can't be listed but people search for it, then answer with your own name and a genuinely useful feature, like local-language scores, kickoff reminders, or match reports. Second, choose categories carefully when listing: check how short the Events or Lifestyle charts are in your target countries and who sits at the top; if your app reasonably fits there, a few thousand installs a week can put you on category charts in a dozen regions. Make sure the category matches the content, since forcing an app into an unrelated category draws reviewer attention too.

How to acquire users: store search as the base, obscure category charts for acceleration, pushes around match days. Don't put pirate brand names in TikTok posts, they get blocked; use generic terms like team names, leagues, and local-language words.

When to get in early: European leagues run until May next year, so listing before the January 2027 winter transfer window still catches most of the season; after May it's off-season and volume drops noticeably (inferred).

Signs you've misread it: ① this package and its same-name peers are all still listed and still climbing after March 2027, meaning Google is turning a blind eye to the term and the window is longer than assumed; ② conversely, the whole VISIONCRAFT account gets banned before year-end, meaning the impersonation matrix lives shorter than a per-package view suggests; ③ three or more football apps crowd into the Indonesian Events chart in December, meaning peers have copied the obscure-category trick and it's no longer cheap.

Data and sources

• Installs, chart positions, listing and update dates, store copy, and the developer's other apps: Google Play store page, developer page, and daily data, as of 2026-11-06. Cumulative installs and daily installs before Oct 31 are estimates from the third-party tool AppstoreSpy.
• Delisted same-name packages and their lifespans: records from AppBrain and ASO Lab pages. CricFy-TV's chart-region count comes from AppWinners.
• Score808 brand: MultiChoice press release (2024-10-31), TorrentFreak (2022-12-10); Softonic download page; YouTube search.
• TikTok search results (11-06); public X posts in the last 30 days.
• iOS same-name app: public App Store information.
• Ad revenue is estimated, with no public revenue figures; whether the app has a live-stream entry point or external redirects was not verified by installing it.