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The internet has made it easier than ever to tune into sporting events around the globe, and it’s also made it easier than ever to do so without paying for it. However, many people who’ve become accustomed to harnessing illegal streams have been dealt a serious blow following a sting that led to one of the most reliable sites being shut down.
We live in a world where sports fans can access virtually any game they desire by pressing a few buttons, and virtually every league and major network offers a plan that allows you to use your television, phone, or computer to tune into the action. However, they tend to be accompanied by a sizeable fee, and the current media landscape requires most people to subscribe to multiple services if they want to legally watch every game they desire.
If you, say, wanted to watch every single NFL game that’s played this season, you’d have to shell out over $750 due to the fragmentation that would require you to pay for Sunday Ticket on top of a YouTube TV subscription along with the fees required to access Netflix and Amazon Prime Video.
Of course, savvy fans know there are more than a few ways to access all of those contests for Free.99 thanks to the many websites that offer decidedly illegal streams that anyone who’s willing to deal with a page littered with invasive ads can easily access.
However, one of the go-to platforms has ceased to exist just as football season gets into full swing.
Two men have been arrested in Egypt as part of a sting operation that led to the illegal sports streaming site Streameast being shut down
In 2024, LeBron James was caught using the illegal streaming platform known as Streameast to watch a playoff game between the Mavericks and the Timberwolves while sitting courtside at an AAU game, and plenty of fans who were already very familiar with that website were worried about the unwanted attention he’d managed to draw to their sports plug.
Another website in the same lane befell the same fate after Adam Schefter seemingly revealed he used it to watch an NFL game last season, but according to an, um, source who definitely isn’t the person who wrote this article, Streameast was still alive and kicking during the first full weekend of the college football season.
However, according to The Athletic, that is no longer the case. The outlet reports the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment, a coalition consisting of more than 5o major players including Netflix, Disney, Amazon, and NBCUniversal, joined forces with the Department of Justice, Europol, and law enforcement agencies in Egypt to track down the people running Streameast
That sting led to two men being arrested in El-Sheikh Zaid, a city outside of Cairo, this week in a raid where police reportedly uncovered “laptops and smartphones suspected of operating the sites” in addition to an undisclosed sum of cash, credit cards, and evidence that suggests the operation laundered more than $6 million in revenue through a shell company located in the United Arab Emirates.
The celebration may be a bit premature, as authorities have spent years playing a game of Whack-A-Mole with Streameast and other platforms that are known for having backup domains and mirrors locked and loaded when another is shut down—and based on some cursory research, there are still some websites operating under the Streameast banner that are still very much operational as of this writing.