Fmovies ‘Sister’ Sites Shut Down, Redirect to Pirate Streaming Alternatives

Pirate sites tend to come and go but in recent months it’s been challenging to keep up with all the changes.

Earlier this year, several popular pirate sites including Zorox, Upmovies, Animeflix, and Vegamovies lost their domains due to legal action. These sites relaunched under new domains, but more confusion lay ahead.

In June, Fmovies switched to a new domain name, Fmovies24.to, after trading Fmovies.to for Fmoviesz.to a few months earlier. These mystery changes have never been explained, but domain-related issues related to site blocking and search engine demotion measures may have played a role.

Fmovies wasn’t the only site to adopt a new domain name; many related streaming portals including Bflix.to, Soap2dayx.to, and Sflixhd.to followed suit. These pirate streaming portals simultaneously redirected their users to new domains and kept running.

While Fmovies initially continued to operate as usual, things started to fall apart towards the end of June. Without explanation, the site stopped adding new movies and TV shows and then last week, things took a turn for the worse. Fmovies completely went offline and remains offline today.

There’s still no official explanation for the shutdown. However, as we highlighted in detail this weekend, ongoing enforcement efforts alongside political and diplomatic pressure may have played a role. The fact that the MPA visited Fmovies’ alleged home country, Vietnam, right when the trouble started, is definitely noteworthy.

More Pirate Streaming Sites Shut Down

In a similar vein, there are more ‘coincidences’ that are worth pointing out. This weekend, more than a dozen pirate streaming portals suddenly shut down at the same moment. This includes websites with millions of monthly visitors, including flixtorz.to, movies7.to, and swatchseries.mx.

Visitors who access these sites today are greeted with a brief message, informing them that the site has closed. Instead, they are conveniently redirected to a new pirate streaming site, as shown below.

“The site has been closed. To continue watching free movies, you will be redirected to other site [insert domain here] (managed by other team),” the brief message on these domains reads.

The redirection technique is similar to the one we saw when Fmovies and others switched to new domain names in June. The main difference now, is the statement that the ‘redirecting’ domains are operated by a new team. Why this is happening now is not mentioned.

The New Anonymous

Apparently, the sites’ former operators believe it’s important to stress that the new sites are managed by new people. That should be fine for most users, as the initial owners were anonymous anyway. Whether a site is operated by X or Y, shouldn’t matter to them.

Perhaps this message isn’t meant for users, but for the MPA, ACE, and others who are trying to bring the operation down? The recent shutdown of Fmovies suggests that enforcement efforts are paying off; rightsholders previously signaled that they had identified some of the people involved.

Whether this redirection strategy will be effective has yet to be seen. In a way, however, it’s quite telling.

The fact that identical messages appeared on all sites suggests that they are managed by the same group. At minimum, there is some coordination going on. This is also supported by the overlapping Google Tag Manager on these sites, which is installed for advertising purposes. Publicly available information confirms this.

The same line of code was also connected to Fmovies, which explains why these other sites are taking action now. With Fmovies offline, and all other sites down as well, the trouble should be over now, right?

The MPA and ACE are unlikely to walk away since they’re all too familiar with sites ‘changing’ ownership. Last year, anime streaming portal Zoro.to was acquired by Aniwatch.to, which later rebranded to HiAnime. These new sites are just as big of a target as the original.

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Below is a list of domains that had a redirection notice in place at the time of writing. There might be more.

– flixtorz.to
– movies7.to
– hdtodaytv.nl
– hdtoday.la
– flixer.ac
– flixer.mx
– swatchseries.mx
– putlocker.ph
– flixhq.bz
– flixtortv.to
– watch32.id
– yeahmovies.to
– watchserieshd.mx
– flixtor.one
– movies2watch.mx
– watchmovieshd.bz

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.