Sting operation kills “copycat” sports piracy site with 1.6B visits last year

On Wednesday, a global antipiracy group, which included Apple TV+, Netflix, The Walt Disney Studios, and Warner Bros. Discovery, announced that it had assisted in a sting operation that took down Streameast, described as the “largest illicit live sports streaming operation in the world.”

Now, accessing websites from the thwarted Streameast brings up a link from the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE) that explains how to watch sports games legally. However, people have reported that they can still access illegal sports streams from a different Streameast, which is the original Streameast. The endurance of the popular piracy brand is a reflection of the entangled problems facing sports rights owners and sports fans.

Sting operation kills Streameast “copycat”

Yesterday, ACE, which is comprised of 50 media entities, said the Streameast network that it helped take down had 80 “associated domains” and “logged more than 1.6 billion visits in the past year.” The network had 136 million monthly visits on average, The Athletic reported.

An ACE spokesperson told Ars Technica that about 10,000 sports events have been illegally shown on the streaming network over the past six years.

Per ACE, Streameast traffic primarily came from the US, Canada, the United Kingdom, the Philippines, and Germany.

The sting operation that took down Streameast stemmed from an investigation that ran from July 2024 to June 2025, Deadline reported. ACE worked with Egyptian authorities, Europol, the US Department of Justice, the Office of the US Trade Representative, and the National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Centre, per The Athletic.

ACE's spokesperson said:

On the night of Sunday, August 24, into the morning of Monday, August 25, Egyptian authorities carried out synchronized raids targeting two individuals behind the piracy network operating the Streameast group of websites. Twenty-two police officers were deployed in the operation.

The sting resulted in the arrest of two men over suspicion of copyright infringement in El Sheikh Zayed City near the Greater Cairo metro area. Egyptian authorities reportedly confiscated cash and found connections to a company in the United Arab Emirates used for laundering $6.2 million in "advertising revenue," per The Athletic. Investigators also found $200,000 in cryptocurrency. Additionally, they confiscated three laptops and four smartphones used to operate the pirating sites and 10 credit cards with about $123,561, ACE told Deadline.