Authorities took down Streameast, the largest illegal sports streaming site

Online reaction to the news about September’s takedown of Streameast, the world’s largest illegal sports streaming platform, was instructive. Sadness from users was coupled with defiance from other commenters, YouTubers and forums.

The premise: Streameast is dead, long live Streameast.

For those working in anti-piracy, a battle may have been won, but not the war.

“I’m under no illusion that I’ve obliterated the Streameast brand off the face of the earth,” says Larissa Knapp, who spearheads the Motion Picture Association’s long-term anti-piracy operations.

She knows it is a game of whack-a-mole: “When we take one down, five more will come up or more, because folks have that brand recognition.”

The admission from Knapp features in a new special episode of The Athletic FC podcast, The Underground World of Illegal Streaming, which includes exclusive insight into how the operation to disrupt the infamous piracy site — in collaboration with Egyptian authorities — unfolded.

• Listen to or watch this special episode of The Athletic FC podcast free

“Streameast is a brand that has become so common,” Knapp explains, recounting an exchange with her son who had seen the news and questioned whether the ‘real’ Streameast had been taken down. “I analogised this to him. So when you say, ‘Hey mom, my nose is runny, can you gimme a Kleenex?’, Kleenex is a brand. What you actually mean is tissue, and this is Streameast.”

The former high-ranking FBI agent continues: “We had the previous Streameast — targeted by U.S. Homeland Security Investigations in 2024 — and then obviously a bunch more copycat sites came up. The most recent Streameast, the one the Egyptian authorities took down, was a copycat site.”

But it was the biggest, with an audience of 136 million global users every month.

Here, The Athletic follows “the digital breadcrumb trail”, as Knapp puts it, that ended near the ancient pyramids in Egypt.

“What is Streameast?” ponders Dani Bacsa, one of the lead investigators for the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE), in the episode. “It’s not a single domain (or) website. More than anything, it’s a piracy brand.”

United States-based organisation ACE — led by the Motion Picture Association — works on anti-piracy issues for a group of more than 50 media brands, including sports rights holders and governing bodies like UEFA, which runs European football. Exclusive research carried out for The Athletic found that almost five million people in the UK consumed pirated sports coverage over the past six months.

The investigation into Streameast, which, across its various iterations, provides a variety of illegal sports streams, began in late 2023. It centred on one domain of interest as a starting point: www.streameast.app. ACE’s live sports piracy working group first flagged it, and then DAZN raised it as one of its priority targets.

Bacsa explains in the documentary — covering the culture, crime and crisis associated with illegal streaming — that the site was part of a cluster of more than 120 domains with the largest audience of any Streameast-branded service. “This ring is the largest by number of viewers, with annual visits of between 1.2billion and 1.6billion users,” he says.

The digging would ultimately link the site to Egypt, but that significant audience was international: “The majority of the traffic going to that service came from the U.S., from Canada or the UK,” he says.  

In addition to its huge reach, the site’s resistance to takedown notices and warnings made it “a high priority target”.

From monitoring trends, traffic and using legal discovery tools (which can oblige legitimate service providers that may unknowingly be linked to a criminal operation to provide information), the investigation honed in on an IP address in Egypt.

From there, investigators followed the digital money trail. “We found one of the companies’ crypto movements, so we went through this rabbit hole,” says Bacsa, who soon realised the operation was multi-jurisdictional.

“It led to an offshore shell company that funnelled the funds to two locations: one in the APAC (Asian-Pacific) region and one in Dubai.”

It turned out an Egyptian national was the lynchpin behind the entities, who had a diversified portfolio. “Real estate, cash, other crypto movements,” says Bacsa, who adds that gold bars have often been found, and explains that the aim was to spread the funds widely to avoid detection.

But there’s always a trail: “The funds left a fingerprint,” he adds.

Bacsa says criminal networks previously used cryptocurrencies for a perceived level of “anonymity” but “that’s not the case today”, with law enforcement and private entities having the “ability to trace movements”.

Approximately £150,000 ($200,000) was discovered in multiple crypto wallets. The site had also generated advertising revenue of £4.9million. Often referred to as ‘malvertising’, illegal streaming sites sell advertising space to other criminals that — via pop-ups that pollute the user’s experience — can plant malware onto devices that can steal data or facilitate other forms of cybercrime.

The levels of wealth behind the site allowed ACE to hand over evidence to the Egyptian authorities in June. Relying on support and action from overseas law enforcement bodies is one of the greatest hurdles for those trying to combat piracy, often due to differing regional views on illegal streaming and anti-piracy laws.

In this case, Egyptian officials agreed that action should be taken, so they set a date for “the raid and arrests”, explains Bacsa, who is based in Brussels.

The operation involved 22 officers in two locations and took place on August 24, 2025. It targeted two individuals at their residences in El Sheikh Zayed, approximately 20 miles west of Egypt’s capital, Cairo.

The two men were arrested on suspicion of copyright infringement. Police released a photograph of them (with heads obscured) standing in front of the items seized in the raid. The Athletic has learned their professions, but due to ongoing legal proceedings, we cannot reveal the information. At the time of publishing, they were still being detained by Egyptian law enforcement officials.

Among the confiscated items were three laptops and four smartphones used to operate the sites, as well as 10 credit cards that contained approximately £95,000. Stacks of cash and documents related to shell companies were also discovered.

The investigation into the financial scale of the operation has continued since the arrests. Further advertising revenue of £2.7m has been identified, taking the total to almost £7.6m. Seized cash, combined with further crypto discoveries, totals £450,000.

Identifying whether the collection of sites is associated with other Streameast domains is an ongoing process involving investigations in multiple jurisdictions.

Bacsa says focusing on “the worst of the worst criminal networks” is vital, as they involve “money laundering, tax evasion and other forms of organised crime”. His aim is to continue to “hit them where it hurts the most and the rest will follow”.

One Reddit blog, claiming to be from the ‘original’ Streameast — which had previously been targeted — highlighted that it was still up and running and people should not “use fake sites”.

Bacsa believes other Streameast sites will aim to capitalise on the disruption to the service from Egypt, as users search for alternatives or copycat sites. He says they are monitoring the “ripple effect”.

We would like to hear your views on illegal streaming. Please complete the anonymous survey below and we will publish the findings later this week.