United States
United Kingdom
The global sports betting market is once again booming now that most countries have lifted COVID-19 regulations and international sports have returned to action.
The Global Lottery Monitoring System (GLMS) has been keeping a close watch on all sports betting transactions and have released its first quarter report for 2021.
GLMS monitored all suspicious sports betting transactions from around the world and reported that Europe had the highest number of flagged transactions.
There were a total of 323 suspicious betting transactions reported during the first quarter and only Europe had a three figure report of suspicious betting tractions.
Out of the 323 flagged transactions, Europe account for 160 of those transactions. Asia was second on the list with 66 transactions while South America was in third place with 56 transactions. North America was next with 14 transactions, Africa had 8 transactions and Oceania had 7 transactions. A total of 10 alerts came under the ‘international’ category.
The sport that received the most number of red flags in Europe was football as there were a total of 94 flagged transactions while basketball took second place with 30 warnings. Some of the other sports that were flagged in the GLMS report include tennis, ice hockey, eSports, handball and volleyball.
GLMS also classified the total number of alerts based on the seriousness of the violation. There were green alerts for the less serious ones, yellow alerts for the next level and red alerts for the more serious ones. GLMS showed that there were a total of 188 green alerts, 67 yellow alerts 13 red alerts. The red alerts have to deal with serious charges like match fixing.
IBIA Numbers Different To GLMS
The GLMS report will give authorities in Europe more insight into how better they can monitor suspicious betting transactions. However, we must also point out that the stats thrown up by the GLMS report are very different to the recent report released by the International Betting Integrity Association (IBIA).
The IBIA report for 2020 showed that there were a total of 270 cases for the year and it was tennis that accounted for the most number of flagged transactions with a total of 98. This was a year on year increase of 48 percent. The International Tennis Integrity Association (ITIA) attended to 39 out of 98 flagged transactions.
