Belgium Orders Registrars to Hand Over Pirate Site Operators’ Bank Details and Crypto Wallets

Last Updated on September 1, 2026 by Steve Salinas

Belgium's anti-piracy unit issued five new decisions this week ordering EU domain registrars and a registry to identify the people behind pirate streaming sites. The intermediaries must hand over names, bank accounts, crypto wallets and a year of connection logs, and they are barred from telling their customers. It's a shift from blocking domains to going after the operators directly.

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What Happened

Belgium's Department for Combating Online Infringement (BAPO) has spent two years blocking pirate sites, with its blocklist now past 1,500 domains. But sites keep switching domain names, so this week's decisions take a different route: instead of blocking, they force the companies that sell and manage domain names to reveal who owns them.

Four of the five decisions go to domain registrars and the fifth to a domain name registry. All are based on an order from the French-speaking Business Court of Brussels, and all are redacted so they name neither the rightsholder nor the target sites. The court's reasoning does point at sports, since it cites the need to protect “the sports economy and the European solidarity model.” Three EU registrars are named in the documents by accident: Hosting Concepts, Hostinger and Key Systems. The registrars and the registry have a gag order and cannot tell the customer, the press or anyone else that the request exists.

Key Facts

5 decisions were issued this week: 4 to domain registrars and 1 to a domain name registry.
Each registrar must hand over 7 categories of data, including the customer's name, every postal address, email and phone on the account.
Bank data covers full IBANs, holder names and card details down to the issuing bank, country and card type.
Crypto is covered too: wallet addresses, asset types and transaction hash IDs.
The registrars must also produce account-creation data (IP address, device, OS, browser) plus 12 months of connection logs.
A gag order stops the intermediaries from telling anyone, including the press, that the request exists.
Belgium's site-blocking list has passed 1,500 domains in the past two years.

What It Means

The practical question is enforcement. The named registrars sit outside Belgium, so BAPO is leaning on Article 10 of the EU's Digital Services Act, which lets one member state order data disclosure from providers elsewhere in the bloc. BAPO even claims the orders reach beyond the EU. The DSA usually forces a provider to tell a user their data was handed over, but BAPO argues a criminal-investigation exception applies. If this approach holds, operators can lose their identity, banking history and logs without ever finding out, which makes running a pirate streaming operation noticeably riskier in Europe.

Related Guide

For a legal way to keep watching the sports you want, our step-by-step guide to watching Fox Sports in Belgium covers the full setup with a VPN.

Source: TorrentFreak – Belgian Orders Demand Pirate Site Operators' Bank Details, Crypto Wallets and Server Logs.

This is a news report, not legal advice. Court orders and enforcement practice change quickly. Check your local laws and each service's Terms of Service.