IBIA Reports Claims Annual Costs Of Match-Fixing Is $25 Million
The report presented by International Betting Integrity Association(IBIA) claims that the match-fixing costs constitute up to $25 million in the gambling industry each year.
The figure presented by IBIA is based on the data collected from the operators, the transaction history from customers gambling on the event that turned out to be fixed or corrupted, and the analysis of the criminal and tribunal sentences passed during the corruption cases.
According to the reports, many efforts to prevent match-fixing through national betting restriction due to the bests were placed outside of the jurisdiction where the corruption activity has taken place.
Almost 92% of the basketball match-fixing alerts during 2017-2020 came from the bets placed by the foreign customers, the figure for football was 84% during the same time.
The IBIA commented on the corruption events, “any restrictions on betting products enforced by regulators in the market where the potentially corrupted sporting event took place would therefore have been completely ineffective.”
It added, “The regulatory authority would have no data on any of these potential integrity issues if regulated operators were unable to offer the markets and were unable to track any suspicious betting activity.”
“The demand for those banned products invariably results in consumers migrating to offshore operators unhindered by such product restrictions and outside of that market’s regulatory oversight. This is counterproductive to the core regulatory and integrity policy aim.”
Countries that have induced strict gambling regulation in order to avoid match-fixing events included Sweden, where betting on rules violation such as yellow cards is banned. Sweden regulators have also regulated the number of restrictions on betting on lower-league events.
IBIA’s report also pointed out that the majority of these match-fixing incidents were sporting-related, rather than having the sole purpose of making money.
The report also cited the study by Ghent University, 10% of players approached for match-fixing did the deed for money while 70% of cases were sporting related.
Considering the 650,000 events which also included the horse racing events in which operators offered betting opportunities 99.96% did not have any suspicious betting alarms, this means only one in every 2700 events generated an alert.
The report also went on to dispel the misconception that fraud betting primarily takes action online, 1 in 5 of the football alerts originated from the retail outlets between 2017-2020. Additionally, the report said that match-fixing events are way easier to detect when done online, making it appear that online betting is a larger risk when done offline.
Between 2017-2020, the majority of match-fixing alerts were generated by tennis with 537, though the IBIA reported that this was due to the large number of tennis matches that took place, as only 0.2% match-fixing alerts were produced.
IBIA said, “Without the ability for IBIA members to offer and monitor this market, this activity would likely have gone undetected and unpunished with bets placed with non-reporting operators.”