The Justice Department announced Monday that it snatched over 1,000 websites used to illegally stream matches during the just-completed World Cup.
The final tally of sites snared includes the nearly 400 internet domains shut down by the end of June.
The seizures in the U.S. occurred through three enforcement actions, the Justice Department said in a release.
American authorities also worked with their counterparts in Latin America to block additional illegal streaming sites, including 14 in Argentina, 309 in Brazil, 1,140 in Colombia, 256 in the Dominican Republic, 223 in Ecuador and 28 in Peru.
Assistant Attorney General A. Tysen Duva said in a statement that the confiscations, titled Operation Offsides, are “part of the Department’s ongoing effort to protect copyright while reducing the risk to American consumers from the malicious software embedded in many illicit streaming services.”
Federal prosecutors did not make any mention of whether anyone had been charged or arrested in connection with the illegal streaming.
The seizures come a year after the shuttering of the 80-site illegal streaming network Streameast, which was the largest such operation in the world, according to The Associated Press.
The network included illegal streams of European soccer leagues as well as U.S. domestic sports leagues, generating $10.2 million in ad revenue, according to The Athletic.
On Tuesday, two Streameast operators were sentenced in Egypt to two years in prison for their role in running the network of piracy sites, according to a release from the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment, an anti-piracy coalition.
The two men are an engineer and a medical doctor, both in their late 30s, according to The Athletic, though Egyptian authorities did not publicly identify either.
