--- title: "Thousands of World Cup Piracy Domains Seized in Two Big Operations" description: "Two coordinated crackdowns, one led by the US Justice Department and one across Latin America, seized or blocked thousands of illegal sports-streaming domains during the World Cup. The specialist site TorrentFreak, which tracked both, notes some operators had already prepared fallback domains abroad." category: "Business" category_url: https://newsparlor.com/category/business author: "Liam Fitzgerald" published: 2026-07-21T07:33:19.000Z updated: 2026-07-21T07:33:19.000Z canonical: https://newsparlor.com/article/thousands-of-world-cup-piracy-domains-seized-in-two-big-operations tags: ["piracy", "streaming", "world-cup", "copyright"] --- # Thousands of World Cup Piracy Domains Seized in Two Big Operations Two coordinated crackdowns, one led by the US Justice Department and one across Latin America, seized or blocked thousands of illegal sports-streaming domains during the World Cup. The specialist site TorrentFreak, which tracked both, notes some operators had already prepared fallback domains abroad. The World Cup drew one of the largest coordinated anti-piracy pushes yet mounted around a single sporting event. Two separate operations, on two continents, seized or blocked thousands of illegal streaming domains, according to [TorrentFreak](https://torrentfreak.com/fifa-world-cup-triggers-a-global-anti-piracy-crackdown/), the specialist outlet that tracked both. The figures below are drawn from that reporting, which cites the enforcement agencies' own announcements. ## The US operation The American effort, named Operation Offsides, was run by the Department of Justice with Homeland Security Investigations. The Justice Department said it had seized more than 1,000 internet domains across three enforcement actions, having initially announced nearly 400. TorrentFreak, counting the seized domains itself, put the number it could independently identify at 627, which is a useful illustration of a recurring gap in these announcements: the headline figure from an agency and the number an outside observer can actually verify are not always the same, and both are worth reporting. The operation was not purely governmental. Its private partners, according to TorrentFreak, included FIFA itself, the broadcaster beIN Media Group, NBCUniversal, the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment, UFC and Warner Bros. Rights holders increasingly fund and coordinate this kind of enforcement alongside the state. ## The Latin American operation The second effort, Operation Red Card, was coordinated by Colombia's Fiscalía General and spanned nine countries. By TorrentFreak's tally the regional total came to 1,970 domains and URLs, the bulk of them in Colombia, which alone accounted for 1,140. The remainder were spread across the Dominican Republic (256), Brazil (309), Ecuador (223), Peru (28) and Argentina (14). This operation also produced arrests, which the domain seizures did not. TorrentFreak reports 15 arrests in Colombia, including four people in Soacha accused of hacking a telecommunications platform, two of whom accepted charges, and, separately, 11 people charged over counterfeit merchandise. Alongside the two operations, the Trustworthy Accountability Group, an advertising-industry body, said it had cut off advertising revenue to 1,376 sites, attacking the piracy problem through its funding rather than its domains. ## Why the domains come back The most instructive detail is about what the seizures do not achieve, and TorrentFreak is direct about it. Operators of the seized sites had, in many cases, already registered fallback domains in Iran, using the country's .ir registry, before Operation Offsides was even announced. Those domains sit outside the reach of US enforcement, and they remained live. A site whose .com address is seized can point its users to an .ir address it prepared months earlier, and continue. That is the structural weakness of domain-based enforcement. Seizing a domain removes a signpost, not the operation behind it, and a well-run piracy service treats domains as disposable. The visible result, thousands of domains down, is real; so is the fact that a determined operator can be running again within hours under an address a foreign registry will not surrender. ## The argument underneath The enforcement bodies and rights holders make a straightforward case: the World Cup's broadcast rights are sold, territory by territory, for very large sums, and that money funds the coverage. Piracy, on this view, is theft that undermines the whole model. The counter-argument, familiar in this field, is not that piracy is legitimate but that it is partly a demand problem. Legal access to major sport is fragmented across expensive subscriptions and blocked by region, and every barrier to watching legally is an incentive to watch illegally. Enforcement specialists themselves, TorrentFreak notes, tend to accept that takedowns interrupt piracy rather than end it. Both things are true at once. The operations were among the largest of their kind, and they worked, in the narrow sense that thousands of domains stopped resolving. Whether they changed anything durable is the question the Iranian fallback domains were quietly answering while the seizures were still being announced. ## Sources - [FIFA World Cup triggers a global anti-piracy crackdown](https://torrentfreak.com/fifa-world-cup-triggers-a-global-anti-piracy-crackdown/) - [US seizes more pirate sports streaming domains, but Iranian fallbacks remain](https://torrentfreak.com/u-s-seizes-more-pirate-sports-streaming-domains-but-iranian-fallbacks-remain/)