Tennis dominated the cases of suspicious sports betting activity for a seventh consecutive quarter, ESSA’s report for the three months ended September 30, 2016 showed. ESSA is a non-profit organization, established to monitor suspicious betting patterns and to work with operators and other involved parties on protecting the integrity of sports and sports betting.
During this year’s third quarter, the organization registered a total of 37 suspicious betting patterns cases, compared to 41 instances of questionable activity reported during the three months ended June 30, 2016. Tennis accounted for 84% of all cases. A breakdown of all suspicious betting reports showed that 31 of those were in tennis and 3 were in football; there was also one in volleyball, beach volleyball, and table tennis. All occurrences of allegedly illicit sports betting activity were reported to the relevant regulators and authorities to be further probed into.
As mentioned above, tennis has been dominating the suspicious betting cases reported for the past seven quarters. Tennis alerts accounted for 82% and 83% of the whole for the first and second quarters of 2016, respectively.
ESSA deems a betting pattern unusual or questionable when there is an unexpected activity and unusually big bet sizes or number of bets placed for a given sports event. In order to confirm such occurrences as suspicious, the organization first makes due inquiries in the matter.
ESSA currently works with and represents 22 of the world’s largest regulated sports betting operators, with industry giants like bet365, Ladbrokes, William Hill, and Paddy Power being only several of them.
Being one of the most popular sports, its integrity has often been questioned and probed into. This is why it has created its own investigative unit – the Tennis Integrity Unit (TIU). Established in 2008, it has been charged with investigating into cases of gambling-related corruption, suspicious betting activity, and other occurrences that may impact the integrity of tennis as a professional sport.
Most recently, the TIU confirmed that it was looking into suspicious betting patterns from a Wimbledon match that had taken place during the championship’s 2016 edition. However, the unit did not disclose more details about the match that had appeared on its radar screen.
The unit came by 96 alerts on potentially suspicious betting activity in the three months ended September 30, with two of them for Grand Slam matches, 31 for ATP Men’s Challenger, 54 for ITF Men’s Futures, and 9 for ITF Women’s. However, the TIU pointed out that an alert was not an immediate evidence of match-fixing.
