Internet sports betting becomes criminal domain

The rapidly mushrooming number of illegal sports betting websites is heightening concerns among authorities about global corruption, money laundering and gambling addiction.

There are now an estimated 15,000 such sites on the World Wide Web, including some 13,000 illegal ones, shuffling around 15 billion euros (23.6 billion dollars) a year, according to the authorities.

These dizzying figures have finally stung sports authorities into action. Late last year, International Olympic Committee (IOC) president Jacques Rogge compared the gambling issue to the gangrene caused by doping in sports.

He proposed the creation of a world surveillance agency based on the model of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), which leads the fight against drugs in sport. The explosion of Internet sports betting, which has flowed across national borders that previously confined gamblers, has created a virtual market that is controlled mostly from Asia.

On these sites, gamblers have been known to lose large sums of money, either fairly or increasingly as victims of fraud, a trend that is threatening the credibility of sport.

Declan Hill, a journalist and British expert on the problem, says the amount of corruption in global sports has increased almost 100-fold in the past five years thanks to Internet-based gambling. "Ten years ago, national lotteries controlled 100 percent of the sports (betting) market," Hill said.

The problem has continued almost unabated since 2006, when a study conducted by the independent Information Systems Security Consulting firm warned of the criminalisation of Internet sports betting.

"The sector of online gaming is today mostly controlled by criminal groups," the security firm said in the study commissioned by a group of European state lotteries. Players had been approached and threatened, referees influenced, and matches bought, it found.

This is the form of corruption that threatens the credibility of sport the most but more common is money laundering, which seems to have become almost routine, based on the amounts of money paid through certain less profitable websites, even for sporting events of little significance. Alarmingly, the amount of money traded on a single website can surpass 100,000 euros for a match in the third division football in Romania, or even the first division of the Czech women's league.

PARIS, Tuesday AFP