New report shows surge in World Cup-related domain registrations.

Opportunists are registering domain names related to the FIFA World Cup in droves.

A new report by WhoisXMLAPI counts over 17,000 domains containing the words worldcup, fifa, wc2026, or world-cup registered in recent months, with a surge of over 10,000 so far this month.

And no, it’s not FIFA registering these domains.

The report shows that just ten email addresses are responsible for over half of the domain registrations.

Nearly 13,000 domains are registered in China’s .com.cn namespace, and a further 3,000 are registered in .com. Almost half of the domains are registered at the Chinese domain registrar Beijing Xinnet.

The biggest category of domains appears to be registered for betting sites, such as fifa1 .bet and betfifa5 .com.

Streaming domains are also popular, such as fifa2 .live and fifa-live .cn.

More details are here.