ACE and UEFA shut down 950M-visit PirloTV piracy network in Mexico

The PirloTV takedown removes a network generating nearly a billion annual visits from the Latin American sports piracy landscape, directly protecting UEFA broadcast partners and potentially redirecting viewership toward legitimate platforms. The operation validates ACE's strategy of pairing sports rights-holders like UEFA, which joined in October 2025, with national government partners like Mexico's IMPI — a model that could extend to other LatAm markets where fragmented broadcasting rights drive piracy demand. Watch whether new PirloTV or RojaDirecta domains resurface quickly, as they have after prior takedowns, and whether ACE escalates from domain disruption to targeting individual operators.

The PirloTV action comes amid heightened anti-piracy enforcement tied to the 2026 FIFA World Cup. On June 19, 2026, ACE announced a World Cup Anti-Piracy Task Force in partnership with the U.S. National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center (IPR Center), backed by broadcasters including DAZN and beIN Media Group. ACE-commissioned research by Dr. Paul Watters found that consumers using live sports piracy sites in Latin America face a 13-fold increase in cyber-threat detections compared to legitimate websites, with exposure rising to 40 times higher in Mexico, Peru, and Brazil (per ACE, June 2026).

The PirloTV takedown also illustrates the persistent challenge of domain-based enforcement. Per TorrentFreak (June 25, 2026), the action is described as a "disruption" rather than a full shutdown — no enforcement actions against individual operators were announced. New PirloTV-branded domains, including pirlotvplay.pl, surfaced as recently as May 2026 and were reportedly still operational at the time of publication, serving World Cup streams. The platform aggregates and embeds unauthorized feeds rather than hosting content directly, making it resilient to single-point takedowns.

UEFA's involvement reflects a broader strategic shift. The organization became the first sports rights-holder to join ACE in October 2025, per Inside World Football (May 2026). Since then, ACE and UEFA have coordinated on-ground investigations, mapping piracy networks and working with local law enforcement. Prior actions include the shutdown of FlujoTV IPTV domains in Latin America and a dynamic site-blocking order in India targeting PirloTV and RojaDirecta domains. The ACE-IMPI memorandum of understanding was signed in December 2025, per TorrentFreak, with the PirloTV operation as its first public output.