July 1 – Nearly 1,400 illegal World Cup streaming sites have just lost their advertising revenue, with the pirates getting hit where it hurts, namely, the wallet.

The move was led by the Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG), a non-profit set up by the advertising industry to fight ad-related crime. It lands less than a week after the US Department of Justice seized close to 400 sites streaming stolen World Cup content under its ‘Operation Offsides’ campaign.

“Global events like the World Cup are prime targets for criminals trying to intercept legitimate ad dollars by stealing popular content,” said TAG chief operating officer Rachel Nyswander Thomas. The group’s threat exchange, she explained, acts as an early-warning system spotting offending sites and choking off their funding in near-real time.

TAG used its network to build a “pirate domain exclusion list,” then shared it across the supply chain to block payments. In total, 1,376 sites have been demonetised.

The DOJ’s side of the fight, run through the National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Centre, leaned on intelligence from FIFA, beIN Media Group, Warner Brothers, and other rights-holders to take down pirates in Bulgaria, Colombia, Croatia, Peru, Poland, and Romania.

“We’ve seized hundreds of domains used to illegally stream matches for profit,” said DOJ assistant attorney general A. Tysen Duva.

This is the latest blow in a long fight. Streameast, once the largest illegal platform on earth, was shut down by the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment, a 50-strong coalition including Amazon, Apple TV+, Netflix, and Paramount.

Contact the writer of this story at [email protected]