Good Morning ☀️,

It’s Lucas here, your Chief Predictions Officer at What Are the Odds?

Today, we came to a shocking realization — a realization that makes this year’s World Cup unique in a way that no other World Cup has come close to before. But we’ll get to that soon.

First, here’s what’s ahead.

What’s ahead in today’s edition of What Are the Odds?:

• How AI’s changing the face of scamming at this year’s World Cup. 🎟️

• Today’s complete match schedule. 🗓️

• Our top pick of the day. ✅

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🇬🇧 England vs DR Congo 🇨🇩

• Stage: Round of 32

• Time: 12:00 ET

• Venue: Atlanta Stadium

🇧🇪 Belgium vs Senegal 🇸🇳

• Stage: Round of 32

• Time: 16:00 ET

• Venue: Seattle Stadium

🇺🇸 USA vs Bosnia and Herzegovina 🇧🇦

• Stage: Round of 32

• Time: 20:00 ET

• Venue: San Francisco Bay Stadium

Want to get the best odds on today’s matches?

Here’s a coincidence we never noticed until now. The 2022 Qatar World Cup kicked off on November 20. ChatGPT launched just 10 days later on November 30, 2022.

That pretty much makes Qatar 2022 the last giant global event to happen in the world before the whole AI thing took off. And that makes this year’s edition a weirdly perfect before-and-after event. Same event, same fans, same content creators, same motivations… but with one big variable that changed. (AI…)

So then, what actually changed?

Well, the obvious answer is “the content.” Duh. And yeah, the content is genuinely something… special. One sign of this is the sheer volume of fact checking/debunking going on at this year’s World Cup at a scale which we don’t remember seeing at the last edition.

To give one example, Euronews' fact-checkers have been debunking everything from fake Hitlers at Germany vs Curaçao, to UK Prime Minister (at the time… now ex-Prime Minister) Keir Starmer sporting a Croatia jersey.

There was also a 12-hour AI "opening ceremony" livestream replete with Argentinian flags (at a tournament hosted by the US, Canada and Mexico) along with a random elephant just casually strolling onto the pitch… because… why not?

And then there’s the entire genre of impossibly hot "fans" in national-team kit with at least one for basically every country. Most of that turned out to be linked straight out to OnlyFans accounts and/or used as bait to lure impressionable young men into various ‘networks’.

And there’s plenty more which we won’t bother getting into because… well, let’s face it — “AI makes fake images now” is kinda boring. Of course it does. Everyone knows that.

But here’s the more interesting part — the bit the World Cup is particularly suited for as “the last major global event before AI ate the world.”

Scams.

The World Cup and scams have always gone hand in hand. Fake tickets. Fake websites. Fake fan experiences. Fake everything that has a price tag attached to it.

And, if the doom-mongering about AI is even partly true (that AI means more scams), then this year’s World Cup should be absolutely rife with people getting fleeced left right and center. (Yeah, okay, this year is rife with that thanks to FIFA jacking up prices… but you know, that’s not really a scam, nor is it an AI story…)

So, did AI actually make people more likely to get robbed buying a World Cup ticket? Did it crank up the volume, the success rate, or the credibility?

Well, here’s the thing — when you line up 2022 against 2026, the answer isn’t anywhere near as clear cut as you’d probably think. And, depending on how you pick and choose your data, you can basically make the case either way.

So let’s start with the case that AI changed everything.

In the lead up to this year’s World Cup,Check Point Research (a giant cyber threat intelligence firm) found 9,741 new FIFA/World-Cup domains registered in April 2026 alone — more than five times the peak of the Qatar 2022 cycle.

Then there was Inter 471 (another cybercrime firm) that put their fake domain total at over 19,000 FIFA/World-Cup domains registered since January 2026. There was also the US Department of Justice’s anti-piracy sweep which found seized 78 illegal-streaming domains during Qatar 2022, and nearly 400 for 2026. Again, that’s about a 5x increase over 2022.

However, that’s all just volume data, which doesn’t tell us anything about how many people are actually getting scammed. After all, a website is useless if it’s not getting any traffic.

What’s maybe more interesting is the whole new level of “polish” that AI has enabled now that it can write your website’s code along with the copy with little more than a simple “make me this” prompt.

One example where AI might have changed the game here came from Group-IB's "GHOST STADIUM" investigation. They found a Chinese crew running a near-pixel-perfect clone of fifa.com with everything from a cloned login flow to real FIFA logos pulled from official servers, 11 languages… and a nasty little hack that resets your actual password so it can lock you out of your real account and resell your tickets. Group-IB reckons the ticket fraud alone here could be anywhere from $71–474 million, with the whole thing potentially into the billions.

So that’s potentially an interesting data point.

Except, here’s the thing — while all those big numbers might look like they prove AI’s having an outsized impact, it’s actually a little complicated.

When you actually look at the the scams running in 2026 vs 2022, they’re pretty much the same scams: fake merchandise, fake tickets, fake-jobs, etc. The only real change is they’ve gotten a little slicker/more polished (thanks to AI), and the volume of fake web sites has increased (again, thanks to AI lowering the cost).

But none of that tells you whether these slicker, more plentiful scam attempts are actually luring more victims compared to pre-AI, because that’s much harder to track than simply counting up the number of fake domains you found and reporting on that one random major fraud case that someone stumbled upon. This is where this report from Lloyd’s — who actually look at it from the bank side (where the money’s actually moving) — is interesting.

In Lloyd’s report, they drop some big numbers (e.g., Football ticket scams up 36% this year). But curiously, they never even mention the word AI when talking about scam vectors. Instead, Liz Ziegler, Lloyd’s Fraud Prevention Director, wrote this:

“Most of the football ticket scams we see start on social media – especially Facebook and Instagram – before the criminal moves the buyer onto WhatsApp and insists on a bank transfer to pay. It’s incredibly convincing, and we don’t want fans to lose their money trying to support their team. We’re urging supporters to stay alert and stick to official ticketing channels.”

Notice something there?

That’s right — Lloyds (who actually has the financial data that lets them see how real people are actually being scammed rather than simply counting up the number of of scam websites) isn’t warning its customers about AI deepfakes and other sophisticated AI-enabled attack vectors as the major threat.

Instead, they’re signalling the exact same con that worked in 2018 and 2022 — a con run by a human on a smartphone using the exact same techniques they used before AI.

And that kinda makes sense if you think about it. After all, it’s not like AI actually solved the truly expensive part of scamming. Sure, it made writing a social media post a zero-effort operation. But that was already cheap relative to the total cost of the scam — the need to run an army of aged social media accounts, burner SIMs and virtual numbers that all eventually get reported.

And the same applies to fake websites. You still need distribution — advertising, spam email infrastructure + mailing lists. You still need to cash out without getting caught— money mules, fake identities, and laundering services. And even just keeping your website up is an expensive battle in itself, even if AI made the actual creation of it basically free — the GHOST STADIUM investigation noted that a full 3,800 of the 4,300 fraudulent domains it found were merely parked/dormant waiting for activation at a later date. Presumably, the only reason anyone needs 3,800 dormant/parked domains is because they’re afraid their currently active ones are at risk of takedown.

So what does this mean?

Well, there’s a chance that AI might not have changed much this World Cup. While the content might have gotten better (or worse… depending on how you feel about seeing the Argentinian flag at the opening ceremony), the scams themselves — and what it takes to actually pull them off — didn’t really change all that much.

And that probably means the defense is pretty much the same as it was pre-AI. Type fifa.com in yourself before entering your username/password. Treat anyone wanting crypto or a bank transfer with suspicion. You know — the usual stuff that worked in 2022.

In reality, maybe the only thing we’ve really lost is the luxury of squinting at the spelling as a surefire tell.

⚽ England vs DR Congo
🏟️ 2026 FIFA World Cup (Round of 32)
📅 Wednesday 01 July; 18:00 (Europe/Paris)

• Why we’re watching: DR Congo’s had a dream run — first World Cup victory; deepest run. Who doesn’t want to see just how far they can push it?

• Top 3 Stats:

  • England’s currently #4 in the FIFA World Rankings, and finished first in their group with 2W/1D/0L with 6 goals scored and 2 conceded.

  • DR Congo’s currently #41 in the FIFA World Rankings, and finished third in their group with 1W/1D/1L with 4 goals scored and 3 conceded.

  • These two have never met in a head-to-head match before.

• CXSports says: Let’s skip past the story and start with with the most obvious difference here — the possession split. In the group stage, England controlled 65.3% of the ball — the third-highest of any team in the tournament. Meanwhile, DR Congo only had 38.5%, making them one of the lowest in the group stage (38th). That alone probably indicates what kind of game this one’s going to be — a game where DR Congo is less interested in trying to outplay England, and more interested in merely surviving it. Probably with the same low-block, counter-punch approach that earned them a 1-1 draw against Portugal in the opener.
  
  But there’s the problem if they go with that plan, and the problem’s name is Harry Kane — England's all-time leading scorer at the tournament who got there scoring in two of England's three group games. Now add in Bellingham, and a general midfield setup that’s generating proper line-breaking output (Elliot Anderson alone managed 30 line-breaking passes, 20 duels won, and 20 possessions won in the group stage, a combination matched by only one other player at the entire World Cup) and you have a side that should blow past the low-block plan over 90 minutes. (Even if it took them 62 minutes to do it against Panama.)
  
  Still, DR Congo has a route in this game that might offer some hope — Yoane Wissa, who’s scored three goals this World Cup. And what’s more, Wissa doesn't need much — he equalized against Portugal from a half-chance, and scored twice off the back foot against Uzbekistan. And that’s not an ideal situation for an English defense that, by their own admission, "haven't been tested to a great extent in the group stages" outside of that one shaky spell against Croatia.
  
  With that said, broader history here is hard to ignore. This game will be the 11th time an African nation has faced a former World Cup winner in the knockouts. And of those 11, only 1 has ever gone through — Morocco, on penalties, in 2022, against a Spanish side that dominated possession without ever really using it. And if that last bit sounds like England, think again — they’re not quite that toothless (they scored six in the group stage after all with a +4 goal difference).
  
  And while we’re talking about history, let’s also not forget the experience factor here. DR Congo’s never played a World Cup knockout match in their history. England’s been through this exact fixture type twice before and won both — 3-2 over Cameroon and 3-0 over Senegal.
  
  As for where that leaves us — we’re tipping England to win. They might even do it comfortably. But, if Wissa gets his goal first there’s a chance that victory looks a little less convincing… even if it’s still a victory.

• Score prediction: 2-0 for England

Bet Option #1

• Bet: England Victory

• Odds Range: 1.15-1.32

Bet Option #2

• Bet: Over/Under (Over 1.5)

• Odds Range: 1.24-1.35

Make your sportsbook work for you!

That’s a wrap for today.

Tomorrow, we’ll be back as we gear up for Spain vs Austria, Portugal vs Croatia, and Switzerland vs Algeria.

Until then, stay safe, enjoy the football… and maybe think twice before buying tickets on Facebook marketplace.