News report
World Cup Piracy Crackdown Shows Limits of Domain Seizures, MPA Pushes Site Blocking
TorrentFreak, August 1, 2026. That the seized streaming brands - Buffstreams, Footybite, Totalsportek and Nflbite among them - remained reachable on .ir fallback domains that U.S. authorities could not seize, and that the MPA used this to argue for site blocking instead..
- Source type
- News report
- Published
- August 1, 2026
- Research grade
- S2
- Used in entries
- 1
Bibliographic record
- Publisher
- TorrentFreak
- Published
- August 1, 2026
- Source type
- News report
- Research grade
- Source grade S2
- Language
- English
- Official record
- Not an official publication
- What it supports
- That the seized streaming brands - Buffstreams, Footybite, Totalsportek and Nflbite among them - remained reachable on .ir fallback domains that U.S. authorities could not seize, and that the MPA used this to argue for site blocking instead.
- Dataset id
- src_torrentfreak_world_cup_domain_seizures_2026
Research notes
- By Ernesto Van der Sar. JSON-LD datePublished 2026-08-01T08:45:30+00:00. 1 August 2026 is the date the page carries, not a month-start stand-in.
- This is the follow-up to the 13 July 2026 TorrentFreak piece; it generalises the fallback-domain finding rather than adding new domain-level evidence.
- The site-blocking argument is the MPA's advocacy position as reported, not TorrentFreak's conclusion.
How this source is used
Cited 1 time across 1 record type.
The role on each citation records what the source was relied on for. A primary source establishes the fact, a supporting source corroborates it, technical evidence describes the infrastructure, and a later outcome records what happened afterwards.
Sources were reviewed to a research cutoff of August 23, 2026. Addresses recorded after that date are not reflected here.
Cited by
Later activity
1 citation
Cited for activity recorded after the takedown.
-
Pirate sports streaming fallback domains (.ir and other TLDs)Later outcome
Same operators, Operation Offsides (2026 FIFA World Cup streaming domains)