Because most of them are, and readers know it. The largest discussions in this market are not about features, they are people asking how to avoid being scammed, and the single busiest thread of that kind has drawn hundreds of replies. Meanwhile the pages that rank for provider queries carry twenty or forty names in an order nobody can reproduce, updated by changing a year in the headline. That is why a ranking is the wrong output. A list of tests is the right one, because you can run tests yourself and you cannot audit somebody else's ordering.

Crypto-only payment comes first: it removes any route to dispute a charge, which is precisely why a service short on confidence prefers it. Refunds offered as gift cards or store credit come second, since a refund that cannot leave the store is not a refund. Third is refusing to sell any trial at all, because a service certain of its own capacity is happy to be tested cheaply for a day. None of the three proves fraud on its own, and plenty of ordinary businesses take crypto, but all three together describe an arrangement designed so that your money moves one way.

1. 1Crypto-only payment removes dispute options
2. 2Store credit is not a refund
3. 3No trial at any price is a confidence signal

Four things, all before spending more than trial money. Whether a short paid test exists and what it costs, which for us is $5 for 24 hours. Whether plans carry a stated refund period, which here is seven days, with the trial excluded because it is already a paid test. Whether a card stays on file after checkout, which it does not. And whether the subscription renews on its own, which it does not either. Add the operational numbers a service should be willing to publish: 54,000+ live channels, 219,577+ on-demand titles, 1-5 simultaneous connections, unlimited installs, and 99.99% uptime, which is about 53 minutes of downtime across a year.

Longevity. No page can tell you a service will still be running in eighteen months, and any provider promising that is describing a wish. This is the reason experienced posters keep repeating the same advice: prefer commitments you can walk away from, and price a year as a year rather than as an open subscription. It also explains why the terms above matter more than a review score. A short trial, a real refund period, no stored card, and no automatic renewal mean the worst case is bounded to a known amount rather than an open one.