The limited amount of sports to wager on around the world during the COVID-19 shutdown has increased the risk of match-fixing, according to sports betting industry panelists speaking Wednesday at the SBC Digital Summit.
Soccer matches in Belarus and Nicaragua have received increased wagering during the pandemic. Bettors have also turned to table tennis, eSports and even darts to fulfill their betting urges.
In a panel discussion titled “COVID Implications for Sports Integrity,” Rupert Bolingbroke, vice president of the Global Monitoring Lottery System that monitors sports betting and detects suspicious activity, raised concerns of recent sporting events, though without citing anything specific.
“For me personally, we got a lot of stuff going on that is far more likely to have been fixed,” said Bolingbroke, who is head of trading for the Hong Kong Jockey Club.
Andrew Ashenden, chief betting officer for Stats Perform, a data and AI technology company, said that because few matches are taking place, it increases the risk that they’ll be targeted by criminal enterprises, which traditionally target lower-tier clubs, youth teams, clubs with poorly paid athletes and competitions with poor track records “that will always raise flags for us in any environment,” Ashenden said.
Bolingbroke said the sports betting model “is completely out the window and blown up” without European football matches like the Premier League.
The dominant player so far is Belarus, which has a history of match-fixing and ghost matches (wagers taken on games that don’t occur).
When there’s a significant amount of wagers on matches like there is now, Ashenden said, fixers can afford to place large bets and pay small fees to get the match fixed.
“Without that element, fixing can’t happen,” Ashenden said. “You can’t fix an NBA game or NFL game without a major fraud issue, but if you have a massive (betting handle) in a very small league, fixing becomes incredibly easy. You just need a few people and you’re done.”
Gilles Maillet, the director of sport integrity with La Française des Jeux (FDJ), the French government-owned operator of sports betting, said because lower-level competitions are all that’s left, the risks are higher by offering “bets on clubs and athletes that financially are potentially fragile. That makes them a target for match-fixing. I do think the risk is higher than before.”
Maillett said criminal organizations are even willing to target new or emerging sports and said “we have to be very careful.” The FDJ, for example, won’t offer bets on Nicaraguan football.
Bolingbroke said they aren’t offering sports wagers like other operators. “A vast majority of operators get in a spot of bother when they change their limits to accommodate (handle).”
Matt Fowler, director of integrity for the International Betting Integrity Association, said the landscape has changed “significantly” in recent weeks. Members are saying it’s a new normal when table tennis has the highest volume on a Saturday afternoon -something that would have been ludicrous a few weeks ago, he said.
Fowler added, however, that they haven’t “seen a surge of suspicious activity” during the lockdown and many “false positives” are due to operators not knowing the correct price.
Bolingbroke said platforms have made massive strides in monitoring, but it’s a difficult time to ask governments for any help with an integrity problem, since they’re focused on dealing with COVID-19. The one positive is that, normally, operators and regulatory platforms have thousands of matches to monitor every week, but the events are quite limited now.
“Any fix would be quite high-profile,” Bolingbroke said. “We actively monitor soccer and basketball matches, tennis-table tennis and eSports events at the same time.”
