Soap2Day - Is it Legitimate and Safe?

There are a number of websites similar to Soap2Day that are still up and functional on the web. What they have in common is that they all allow you to watch movies and series online, completely for free, and they also all serve ads, often from questionable sources, and have a lot of advertising on them in general.

The first question you might ask yourself if you come across a website like Soap2Day would probably be "Is all of this legitimate?". Naturally, the answer is very plain - no, none of it is legitimate and streaming full movies online, for free, is not legal at all.

The content offered on those sites is all licensed movies and series, screened in cinemas, sold on DVDs, or broadcast over the respective network. Websites such as Soap2Day offer it completely free, while also serving advertising that generated revenue for the website owners. In our testing, we ran into multiple ads for online gambling sites, as well as a pop-up that led to a malicious download containing executable files.

The advertising is not displayed as embedded ads on the Soap2Day website. Instead, the site uses an invisible overlay that is triggered when users attempt to play a movie or series episode in the web player on the site. Clicking the invisible overlay does not start the video stream but instead opens new browser tabs, leading to advertiser pages, some of which are potentially unsafe and may lead to further malware infections.

Soap2Day has a top-level .org page that lists all other domains used by the service. Most of those are unusual and cheap domain extensions such as .cc or .to.

So, to recap, given the fact that Soap2Day serves paid, licensed content, owned by movie production companies and broadcasting networks, all for free, and also displays intrusive ads that may also lead to potentially unsafe pages and files, the website is not at all legitimate and not particularly safe either, unless you run a very rigorous ad blocker that will spare you of all the advertising.