There are lots of methods that pirates use, their websites are an absolute nightmare to navigate sometimes and you can't be sure that the link you're clicking on is an ad, an extra referral hop, an embed, or the actual video.
There is a whole secondary market of paywalled pirate services which makes it harder to discover. But then the anti-piracy companies just join the telegram groups, subscribe to those services, and then get the links in order to issue the takedown notices. There's a lot of human intelligence as well as automation. Heck, a handful of agents in India can do a heck of a lot of manual link hunting in an afternoon.
It's also worth noting that a lot of illegal streams are syndicated, so you take down one source and it'll break 50 websites.
There is a whole secondary market of paywalled pirate services which makes it harder to discover. But then the anti-piracy companies just join the telegram groups, subscribe to those services, and then get the links in order to issue the takedown notices. There's a lot of human intelligence as well as automation. Heck, a handful of agents in India can do a heck of a lot of manual link hunting in an afternoon.
It's also worth noting that a lot of illegal streams are syndicated, so you take down one source and it'll break 50 websites.