Type a familiar address for a free World Cup stream and you may land on a US government seizure notice instead. Federal agents pulled nearly 400 domain names offline in late June, all of them accused of carrying FIFA World Cup matches without permission.
The Justice Department announced the seizures but never published a list of the seized names. It says Homeland Security investigators picked out the names. FIFA helped, and so did beIN Media Group, NBCUniversal, UFC, Warner Bros and the anti-piracy group ACE.
Agents went after servers in Peru and Bulgaria too. Similar raids followed in Croatia, Romania, Poland and Colombia.
Which sites went dark
With no official list, TorrentFreak built its own. It watched for names that suddenly started pointing at seizedservers.com, an address it says US seizures have used before, and traced hundreds that way. TorrentFreak calls its own list unofficial and incomplete, so it's a trail, not a roll call.
TechWalrus typed in five of the names on that trail, kora-shoot.com, beinmatchtv.com, rojadirectastv.org, fbstream.cc and kooraliveworldcup.com. Several answered with what looked like a US government seizure notice.
That's only what those five returned when we typed them in on the day we checked. Whether the people behind them broke any law is a question for a court, not a web page.
TorrentFreak DNS-traced domains
Why it won't stop piracy
Some of these names had ordinary lives first. TorrentFreak found one that used to be a fitness blog, one full of CBD content and one built around a music project. Somebody took them over later and pointed them at match streams.
Taking a .com away is the easy case, because the company that runs .com can simply switch it off. A stream that moves to a domain ending that sits outside American reach keeps going, and TorrentFreak says several similar sites stayed up right through the raid.
What a seizure does buy is a bad week in the middle of a live tournament. Old links, bookmarks and search results for those exact addresses stop working, even when a replacement is already running.
TorrentFreak lapsed-domain notes
Fans get the ugly trade
Homeland Security's warning to fans was blunt. Sites like these can hand you malware, or carry the video over a connection that leaks the personal and payment details you entered on the site.
