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

**Address:** [https://torrentfreak.com/world-cup-piracy-crackdown-shows-limits-of-domain-seizures-mpa-pushes-site-blocking/](https://torrentfreak.com/world-cup-piracy-crackdown-shows-limits-of-domain-seizures-mpa-pushes-site-blocking/)

**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)](https://takedownindex.org/takedowns/operation-offsides-2026-fifa-world-cup-streaming-domains)

Same operators, Operation Offsides (2026 FIFA World Cup streaming domains)

Later outcome

[All sources](https://takedownindex.org/sources)