Scammers Kick Off Early: TRM Spots World Cup Crypto Grids Already Warming Up 🥅

TRM Labs has identified three active crypto scam operations built around the 2026 FIFA World Cup, including two fake ticketing sites and one fixed-match betting pitch tied to four crypto addresses, the blockchain intelligence company said. The findings come as the tournament, hosted across Canada, Mexico and the US, opened on Thursday with FIFA projecting about 6.5 million fans in attendance and an estimated $40.9 billion in global gross domestic product impact.

"Criminals always look to exploit major events and cultural moments and they don't wait until kickoff," Ari Redbord, global head of policy at TRM Labs, told Cointelegraph. "Scammers build and position their infrastructure weeks in advance, then scale it the moment public attention peaks." Redbord added that the onchain nature of crypto payments allows investigators and compliance teams to act before losses grow.

TRM traced fund flows from the ticketing scam moving through Polygon into Tron, while the betting scheme routes payments into a custodial exchange deposit address for potential cash-out. The company linked the addresses to reports filed on Chainabuse, citing cross-chain bridge movement as a common laundering pattern, with more than $1.9 billion in scam funds having moved through bridges in such operations. TVL in DeFi has dropped to about $68 billion, a near two-year low, according to industry data, as enforcement and onchain analytics activity have intensified in 2026.

The FBI said in May that threat actors are spoofing FIFA websites to collect personal information, sell fake tickets and products, and carry out other malicious activity. FIFA has also warned that tickets purchased outside the official website may be deemed invalid and subject to cancellation without notice. As of Monday, several opening matches in the US and Canada had not sold out on FIFA's platform, according to the Council on Foreign Relations, while the Financial Times reported on Tuesday that official resale portals still held 176,000 unsold tickets across the group stages.