Sports betting and corruption: How to preserve the - SportAccord

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Sports betting and corruption: How to preserve the integrity of sport match rigging can also be reduced in this way and transferred to another operator who repeats the process, and so on. The financial risk connected with fraudulent betting is spread across a whole section of the market, thereby becoming acceptable for each operator. Lastly, one cannot dismiss the idea that an operator can take advantage of the behaviour of a client account that wins regularly by copying or overplaying/exaggerating its bets with other operators. If a gambler has a history of winning bets and places a bet of tens of millions of euro on the score of a second-class match, the operator may suspect that the gambler is taking advantage of illicit information about the match, and may in its turn bet an even larger sum with its competitors. The risk is not merely hedged, it is reversed! The global sports betting market is one in which liquid assets circulate rapidly and every operator is involved in a bidding war . The sports betting economy is currently dominated by the Asian sites, which concentrate the greatest liquid assets and define the market trends. In fact, European operators generally open bets several days before the Asian operators, but change their odds to bring them into line with those offered by the Asian operators. In Albania for example, betting operators adjust their prices to match those of the three most influential Asian sites 88 . The weight of Asian sites on the world market testifies to their financial power and proves their ability to absorb fraudulent bets, even substantial ones, without endangering their financial stability. The leading Asian sites (sbobet, ibcbet, 188bet, 12bet) are now licensed in the Isle of Man and therefore authorised to operate on the British market. The United Kingdom has in fact drawn up a white list of foreign jurisdictions whose standards are consistent with its own, and whose licensed operators may access the British market, even though technically they are not regulated by the Gambling Commission, which is responsible only for operators based on British soil. This white list includes Gibraltar, Antigua, the Isle of Man, Tasmania, Alderney and the entire European Economic Area. Operators licensed in these territories are authorised to provide their offering to British citizens. The authorisation of Asian sites in some European countries symbolises the integration of the global sports betting market and the progressive standardisation of European and Asian operators. European operators such as Betfair, Bet365 and Ladbrokes also offer their services throughout the world and are also experiencing increasingly significant cash inflows. The rise in rates of return to players on European sites, provoked by competition from Asian sites, has increased betting on the latter. Betfair confirms receiving an average of over five million bets per day and can attract bets of nearly 35 million for a single cricket match in the Indian Premier League. Liquid assets circulate between the operators who belong to a vast decompartmentalised worldwide market, even though the Asian sites still largely dominate it. * *** 88 Interview with an employee of an Albanian betting operator, Tirana, 28 June 2011. 48
Sports betting and corruption: How to preserve the integrity of sport The risk of fraud that is currently threatening the integrity of our sporting competitions is the result of an interaction between the vulnerabilities intrinsic to the operation of the world of sport, and the formation of a worldwide sports betting market, one section of which is totally unregulated. The main vulnerabilities of the world of sport are the physical ease with which matches can be rigged, the financial uncertainties of the sector, and its impenetrability - even impunity in some contexts. On the other side of the coin, the integration of European and Asian betting sites has helped to form a vast deregulated market where an individual is totally free to place astronomical bets on any competition in the world. Nowadays, fraud in sport linked to sports betting can take any form. It may originate with an athlete who places bets individually on an event of which they have chosen to alter the course, or a club that has chosen to sell a match for financial gain. However, there is a growing risk from criminal organisations who are targeting sport and taking advantage of the lack of cooperation between the authorities of different countries in the fight against transnational crime. The risk of sporting manipulation is therefore latent, diffuse, multi-form, adapted to different contexts, and more real than ever. How can one surmount the differences between jurisdictions? How can illegal betting be combated? How can licensed operators be effectively regulated? And above all, how can the integrity of sport be protected? 49
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Sports betting and corruption: How to preserve the - SportAccord

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