The seizures, announced Monday (July 20), took place in three different actions during the global soccer tournament, and were based on investigation by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) Washington Field Office and the National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center.
“The sustained effort to seize more than a thousand domains dedicated to illegally streaming the World Cup confirms the administration’s commitment to intellectual property rights and to the success of the 2026 FIFA World Cup,” Assistant Attorney General A. Tysen Duva of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division said in a news release. “Operation Offsides is part of the Department’s ongoing effort to protect copyright while reducing the risk to American consumers from the malicious software embedded in many illicit streaming services.”
Matthew Millhollin, deputy executive associate director of HSI, added that streaming content from illicit sites can place devices at risk.
“Criminals operating these unauthorized platforms are already willing to break the law when they stream copyrighted World Cup games, they might also be planning to inject malware or steal your payment information,” he said.
According to the release, the seized domains offered real-time streams of World Cup matches, in violation of copyright law. The Justice Department said it worked with World Cup governing body FIFA, along with several broadcasting and entertainment groups, on the investigation.
In other World Cup news, PYMNTS wrote earlier this month about an AI-related hiccup involving the tournament.
It happened on July 5, when a Coinbase AI system told millions of users that Norway had defeated Brazil 3-2 in a game that had not yet begun. Norway would ultimately prevail in that match, though the score was actually 2-1.
Sports predictions, that report noted, are low stakes compared to the same failure mode appearing in the financial services space.
Research from PYMNTS Intelligence found that 60% of financial services companies employ AI for credit risk assessment and scoring, with 85% upping their AI budgets in the next 12 months.
“Fraud detection, risk assessment and revenue forecasting are the dominant use cases, the same applications where a confident but fabricated output causes the most damage,” PYMNTS wrote. “When a model makes an error in a financial workflow, money moves incorrectly at speed across thousands or millions of transactions before anyone detects the problem.”
