The hype is real. The jerseys often are not.
Hours before kick-off, Hong Kong Customs seized 230,000 counterfeit items worth an estimated $20 million, including roughly 30,000 jerseys. Nearly 80% were bound for the Americas, where the tournament is being hosted.
A month earlier in Toronto, police made the largest seizure of counterfeit soccer jerseys in Canadian history: more than 16,000 fake jerseys and flags, worth an estimated $3.5 million.
Fakes do not stop at the merch table
Ahead of this World Cup, researchers counted more than 4,300 fraudulent FIFA domains: fake ticket portals, bogus streaming apps hiding malware, and phishing pages built to drain bank accounts.
$474 million in estimated losses from ticket fraud alone. Projections based on visible infrastructure, not confirmed losses.
Chasing a free stream
Researchers tracked a spike in malicious unofficial streaming apps, many posing as popular services, and expect the World Cup to see it on a far larger scale.
Those apps come loaded with Android banking trojans, Massiv and Perseus, which never appear on any official app store. Install one and it slips fake bank login screens over real apps, records what you type, and intercepts the one-time codes sent to texts and authenticator apps. You can hand over banking details without knowing you did it.
The bigger the spotlight, the darker the shadow
Where does the money go? Counterfeiting is one of the primary methods organised criminal groups use to make money, funding serious offences such as drug trafficking and money laundering.
While 48 teams play for a trophy, a criminal economy plays for the brand, the fans, and their wallets. It has been training for months.
Bridge is the team on the other side of that match. We detect, investigate, disrupt, and enforce, online and offline, so a wave of fakes becomes real-world consequences for the people behind them.
Sources: AP / Hong Kong Customs, June 2026; Toronto Police Service, May 2026; Group-IB / FBI Public Service Announcement, June 2026; ThreatFabric; Kaspersky, 2026.