Sports betting integrity body for the lottery industry, Global Monitoring System (GLMS), has reported 23 matches to its partners in the third quarter, with football again being top of the list when it comes to the number of suspicious betting alerts.
GLMS sent out a total of 209 alerts to its members over a three month period to the end of September with 190 of these being attributed to suspicious activity in the global football betting market.
Basketball and tennis then followed in a distant joint second, with five alerts each being recorded in the first quarter. Following the joint pair, came American football with four alerts, then it was esports with two, then one each for handball, ice hockey and table tennis.
The bulk of the alerts was accounted for in Europe, with 166 being generated in Q3 of which 156 were in relation to football betting. Asia then followed with 20 alerts which were all football. South America then followed in third with 10
In contrast, just three alerts were registered for the whole of Africa, while there were no suspicious betting alerts at all for the Oceania region during the quarter.
Of all the alerts which were flagged in Q3, nine were red alerts, which suggests serious irregularities or allegations of match-fixing made by a named source.
A grand total of 171 alerts were raised before an event started, with just two being filed during the game. The GLMS also noted that with the events that raised in-play alerts, both ended as expected.
After three alerts are sent out, if an investigation can uncover no explanation for the suspicious activity, GLMS then generates a report on that specific match or event.
Of the 23 alerts which became reports, 17 were in relation to football, with seven being flagged to football’s European governing body Uefa and one to the global body, Fifa. Other football reports were split between local governing authorities.
GLMS filed five reports with the International Olympic Committee, in addition to two with the Tennis Integrity Unit and one with the Esports Integrity Coalition. A total of 15 reports were sent to local governing authorities in Q3.
GLMS president Ludovico Calvi said: “GLMS monitoring and intelligence have been particularly intense with the beginning of the new sport season, however, over Q3, we were pleased to continue to build solid foundations for global responsibilities and actions in the fight against sport competition manipulations.
This report has come after GLMS last week repeated its call for more countries to ratify the Council of Europe’s Convention on the Manipulation of Sports Competitions to help strengthen its impact on tackling match-fixing in sport.
Also known as the Macolin Convention, the Convention came into force last month, setting out a legal framework to tackle match-fixing, creating legal definitions for issues such as conflicts of interest and illegal betting and establishing new controls to address poor governance and the handling of confidential information.
