Football Fever Fuels Scam Campaigns Across Email and Social Media

## Executive Summary: Bitdefender Labs identified more than 55 coordinated football-themed scam campaigns exploiting FIFA World Cup 2026 interest and club/national-team fandom—using malicious ads on Meta platforms, fake storefronts, phishing pages, email lottery scams, IPTV piracy services, and fraudulent apps—to collect payments and personal data across multiple countries (notably the UK, Portugal, Spain, Brazil, US and others); the report lists suspicious domains, operator attribution clues (including Chinese-language tracking parameters and Cyrillic spoofing), observed TTPs (AI-enhanced imagery, multi-storefront infrastructure, ad tracking parameters), and practical defensive recommendations.