Pirate sports streaming network Streameast taken down

The international ACE coalition, together with Egyptian law enforcement, announced the takedown of Streameast, the world’s largest illegal sports streaming network, which attracted over 136 million visits per month.

Streameast has been operating since 2018 as a free, ad-supported service, offering viewers HD quality broadcasts of ALL football leagues. In addition to football, the network provided access to ALL streams of American leagues. In total, the service operated through about 80 domains, which attracted over 1.6 billion visits per year.

Users first noticed the outage six days ago, when streams and chats began to fail to load. ACE later confirmed that it had worked with Egyptian police to shut down the platform. The operation resulted in the arrest of two people, the seizure of laptops, phones, cash, and bank cards, and the discovery of links to an offshore company in the UAE that laundered more than $6.2 million in advertising revenue and $200,000 in cryptocurrency.

80 Streameast domains now redirect users to the ACE Watch Legally page, which contains links to legal services. However, researchers note that some of the sites remain active or quickly spawn copies.

Streameast has become a symbol of the problem of illegal sports viewing. According to Brand Finance, 43% of fans in 13 countries have used pirated sites to watch matches at least once. Such platforms not only deprive leagues and clubs of revenue, but also pose security risks for users. In the UK, there have already been convictions against operators of local pirate sites that made millions from illegal broadcasts.

The closure of Streameast was a major victory for ACE and its partners, confirming that no pirate network is beyond the reach of international investigations. At the same time, the emergence of “copies” shows that the global fight against piracy is only intensifying and requires constant cooperation between law enforcement and rights holders.