What starts in the US, the cliche goes, inevitably ends up in the UK (burger restaurants, assaulting fellow shoppers on Black Friday and syphilis are favourite examples). But the Americans are not always so keen to embrace our exports.
There are, of course, examples of Brits and our brands smashing it in the US: the broadcaster Alistair Cooke, the Beatles and (so the company’s advertising slogan told us) the industrial conglomerate Hanson, which liked to brag how it was “a company from over here that’s doing rather well over there”. But those occasional triumphs are offset with a long list of wonderful-sounding sales pitches that never quite seemed to deliver much – apart from swingeing losses.
Which brings us to the UK gambling industry, a trade that has been talking about cracking America for a period seemingly longer than Cooke’s whole career.
Apart from the odd arrest of British business folk, very little ever came of these ambitious plans. But then, last May, everything appeared to change. The value of London-listed gambling firms – including 888, Paddy Power Betfair and William Hill – collectively surged by more than £1.5bn after the US supreme court struck down a nationwide ban on sports betting that had stood for 26 years. The Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992 (Paspa) – which effectively outlawed sports betting in the US with the exception of a few states – was suddenly unconstitutional.
Gambling execs rejoiced. Cigars were lit; deals were unveiled; and share prices went briskly, er, down.
In a note by analysts at Canaccord earlier this month, as the stockbroker studied the gambling sector in a reporting season, the number-crunchers observed: “The UK sector is trading on close to a four-year valuation low, and there is a lot of bad news baked into the price.”
There are all sorts of factors playing into that, of course. There are the inevitable tax rises and regulatory changes that the industry has to contend with in Europe: but not everything is going perfectly with the American dream, either.
There, what bookies might have gained on the Paspa swings they are now fretting about losing on the Wire Act roundabout.
Earlier this month the US Department of Justice performed a U-turn by ruling that the Wire Act – which it had previously said outlawed only cross-state wire communications for sports betting – also contains “prohibitions [that] sweep beyond sports gambling”.
Heads were scratched, share prices retreated and consolidation plans were given even more of a hearing than usual.
In a note in advance of a trading statement from William Hill last week, analysts at the investment bank Berenberg said that the bookie was “now ripe to be a takeover target”, after its share price almost halved over the past year.
Hill’s has been at the forefront of efforts in the US, too, so taking a punt on the company means betting heavily that a liberalising US market will compensate for the lost revenues in its established jurisdictions, where fixed-odds betting terminals have been gelded and the bookies fear more regulation to prevent addiction.
Cooke, of course, once filed a dispatch about this. In a 2001 Letter from America, he reported: “Heartening news this week that a drug has appeared experimentally which promises, one day, to cure even compulsive gamblers.”
That day has yet to arrive. There’s a parallel in there somewhere.
January 23, 2019
January 11, 2019
Italy sees rise in sports betting revenue in 2018
Italy’s sports betting market witnessed a 10.5 per cent growth in revenue in 2018 compared to that of 2017.
The regulatory body of Italy, Agenzia delle Dogane e dei Monopoli (ADM), released the results, reporting that the industry generated €1.4 billion in 2018.
ADM also reports that betting turnover for last year reached the €10.9 billion mark, approximately €1 billion higher than 2017. The land-based sector also increased its revenue by 7 per cent in 2018 to €840 million.
While online betting registered a 16 per cent increase over 2017 to €643 million, it is a shy growth when compared to 2017’s total increase figure of 44.5 per cent, and in a year that did not have major sports tournaments such as the FIFA World Cup.
December’s results did not help the full number for 2018, as sports revenue decreased 55 per cent year-on-year to €96.4 million. Both the land-based and online verticals experienced a decline, the latter to €47 million or a 43 per cent decrease.
The regulatory body of Italy, Agenzia delle Dogane e dei Monopoli (ADM), released the results, reporting that the industry generated €1.4 billion in 2018.
ADM also reports that betting turnover for last year reached the €10.9 billion mark, approximately €1 billion higher than 2017. The land-based sector also increased its revenue by 7 per cent in 2018 to €840 million.
While online betting registered a 16 per cent increase over 2017 to €643 million, it is a shy growth when compared to 2017’s total increase figure of 44.5 per cent, and in a year that did not have major sports tournaments such as the FIFA World Cup.
December’s results did not help the full number for 2018, as sports revenue decreased 55 per cent year-on-year to €96.4 million. Both the land-based and online verticals experienced a decline, the latter to €47 million or a 43 per cent decrease.
January 07, 2019
Inside the secret fight against match-fixing in football
An African referee is identified as vulnerable to corruption. He’s persuaded to ensure that a World Cup qualifier has at least three goals. With half-time approaching, it’s still 0-0 and the official gets twitchy. A cross hits a defender on the knee. He awards a penalty for handball. Despite uproarious protests, the spot-kick is converted. The game ends 2-1.
A European club win the first leg of a Champions League match by a large margin. With their progress assured, it’s arranged for them to concede late in the second fixture. With three minutes left, their defence switches off. A ball is punted upfield and a forward heads it goalward. The goalkeeper barely attempts a save.
Fixers arrange for a group of English sixth-tier players to join a club on the other side of the world. Unquestioningly accepted by the new employers, a previously solid side suddenly start losing, and heavily. A young goalkeeper in central Europe is befriended by a rich man. He gets him into clubs, gets him girls and treats him like a rock star. A family debt is soon paid off. Later, he asks him to concede a goal in a friendly game. Who would that harm? This is then used as leverage against him to commit more significant on-field fraud.
There are numerous ways to fix a match. Some are simple, others are sophisticated and barely believable. But when the true beauty of sport is its unpredictability, how on earth is it possible to prove if odd behaviour is down to human error or something a lot more sinister? How can all the above scenarios get busted? Just follow the money.
You’ve probably never heard of Sportradar, and despite the company kindly agreeing to a feature in FourFourTwo, it’s quite happy that way. We’ve stopped by its London offices – it has 34 worldwide, with 1,900 employees – under the condition that we don’t disclose the location, or use any real names.
If this seems like the paranoia of a counter-intelligence unit, that’s because it is. As the world’s foremost experts in betting-related fraud and sports corruption, Sportradar is not mucking around. The people they’re battling against include many international mafias, who often see gambling as a good way to launder money. Death threats were issued to UEFA inspectors in February after the exposure of Albanian outfit Skenderbeu’s involvement in fixing, and a member of the Nepal side appeared to threaten Sportradar’s team after players were put on trial for throwing a match.
Some of the figures involved in the worldwide gambling industry are gobsmacking: an estimated €1.5 trillion a year, with a game like the Champions League final attracting around €1 billion in bets (with 70% of this punting going on in Asia, much of it being unregulated, such figures can never be exact).
As our Sportradar spokesman Ian (not his real name) explains to us: “People don’t realise how big the international market is, and there’s no real way of knowing how big exactly. But it’s a crap-ton of money.”
So how do you go about monitoring such an unwieldy beast? Data, data and more data. Sportradar was started in 2001 by Carsten Koerl (his real name), a German entrepreneur who helped to establish online betting company Bwin.
Koerl recognised that internet gambling would produce a plethora of new bookmakers, but that many would lack the expertise to set odds accurately. A reputable service provider would be needed, and this was Betradar – the part of Sportradar that sells industry-leading information to turf accountants worldwide.
The ‘integrity services’ part arrived in 2005 as a by-product. “Whatever you need to operate a bookie, we can deliver,” says Ian. “But as part of our relationship with the betting industry, we get their information back. It soon became clear that by using this, we can see when bookmakers move away from the rest of the market. It always happens for a reason.”
What many casual punters might not realise is that while odds partly reflect how likely something is to happen, they also reflect bookmakers balancing risk. So if a big amount of money comes in on Crewe to beat Exeter, operators may compensate by offering more attractive odds on Exeter to beat Crewe, to cover potential losses. By the same reasoning, if a fixing group are betting big on a late goal being scored with a certain operator, that bookie will alter its odds to reflect this.
“If one bookmaker is getting a lot of money on something that nobody else is, there can be many innocent reasons,” says Ian. “Maybe they’ve got some injury information earlier than everyone else or they’ve got an excellent analyst – or maybe the bookie’s got it wrong that day, so they realise their mistake and adjust.”
But if one of the 550-plus online gambling companies that Sportradar work with suddenly offers prices that deviate wildly, it can be a smoking gun for match-fixing. “If a lot of people bet on something with unnatural confidence, it could be because someone’s engineered the result.”
The company therefore developed the Fraud Detection System (FDS) – an algorithm that scans 280,000 competitive fixtures annually across 17 sports looking for anomalies. “The algorithms don’t ask questions, they create alerts,” says Ian. “So we need a second stage, called qualitative analysis. This is our team of more than 100 experts. They work 24/7. As soon as an alert pops up, they have 72 hours to determine whether it is a legitimate or suspicious betting pattern.”
The number crunchers carry out their research, chatting to a network of bookmakers and journalists if required. “Maybe our person out there on the ground knows that it was the captain’s birthday so everyone got drunk,” says Ian. “We look at all options. You can’t just say: ‘This is fixing’. You’d be destroying reputations. We’re not a machine gun, we’re a sniper rifle. When we shoot, we get it right. We always start with the betting patterns, but it takes more than that to be credible.”
Sportradar only escalates an incident when it is 100% sure of foul play. To date, this has included 3,800 sports fixtures. The figure has climbed from 146 in 2009 to 650 last year.
This rise reflects more games being surveyed rather than an increase in criminality: Ian estimates that 0.5% to 1% of the matches they monitor are affected. As a result, Sportradar reports have been used in 36 criminal convictions and 251 sporting sanctions (suspensions, bans and fines) to date, with more on the docket.
Sportradar’s experience has provided a unique insight into how fixing works. “It’s not generally some guy bowling up and saying, ‘Here’s 50k, please lose 5-0’,” adds Ian. “Fixers usually groom players and officials. They take time, do them favours and entertain them. Then they’ll call in the favours. And once you do something for them they say: ‘You’ve just fixed a match for me, now you’re my bitch’. Prostitutes or drugs can be used as leverage, while older players are sometimes used to influence and recruit younger ones.”
Often at the core of these shady dealings are large criminal groups. “The Balkan, Italian and Asian mafia are involved,” explains Ian. “The owners of clubs can also be criminals. They tell players: ‘Unfortunately you’re going to lose today’. In some places, players don’t ask questions if they value their kneecaps.”
Fixers can even arrange fixtures. Notorious Singaporean super-fixer Wilson Raj Perumal organised numerous friendlies, for which he would pick the referee. “There’s a preponderance of rigged friendlies, because there’s nothing on the line and participants are more willing to agree,” says Ian. Referees are a common target. “They control the result pretty closely, especially if the fixers are betting on total goals. You don’t care who scores them, you just care that there are three or four. So you dish out some penalties.”
This proved the undoing of Ghana’s Joseph Lamptey, who was caught trying to influence goals scored in a World Cup qualifier between South Africa and Senegal last year. His decision to blow for a penalty after the ball hit Senegal defender Kalidou Koulibaly on the knee was ridiculous, but it’s the kind of blunder referees often make. It was the algorithm that caught him. FIFA – a Sportradar partner – decided to replay a World Cup qualifier due to fixing for the first time, and Lamptey was banned for life.
Perumal’s syndicate was involved in the 2013 Southern Stars scandal. Four players and a coach from the Melbourne club were convicted, along with a Malaysian fixer. English players were involved in play so obviously suspect that their opponents regularly questioned what was happening.
“I was panicking, getting a call when we were losing 2-0 and the boss saying this better f**king happen,” defender Reiss Noel told police about one game. “I felt threatened as we weren’t getting the goals required.” Sportradar’s algorithm had again alerted the authorities, and Noel and a team-mate, goalkeeper Joe Woolley, were banned for life by FIFA after admitting helping to fix matches.
“These guys weren’t exactly brain surgeons,” says Ian. “Police were at the game, and you’ve got a fixer on the phone actually speaking to one player, and him then saying to the goalkeeper: ‘We need to let another in’. Sometimes the footage you watch of keepers jumping the wrong way is almost comical.”
However, there’s also a degree of cat-and-mouse between Sportradar and criminals that wouldn’t look out of place in The Wire. “A few years ago someone realised you don’t even need to manipulate a performance to fix a match – you can just manipulate the concept of a performance,” explains Ian. This led to the extraordinary phenomenon of ‘ghost games’, in which entire matches were faked.
“In order for bookmakers to cover football, they simply need data on what is happening. So it was created from nothing – they sent through details about imaginary goals being scored after they had bet on them.”
Among the games that never kicked off included Maldives Under-21s against Turkmenistan Under-21s from 2012, and Portugal’s Freamunde against Spain’s Ponferradina in 2014. “People innovate – it’s like doping,” says Ian. “We’ve also had some fixers trying not to disrupt the odds by spreading a bet across lots of bookies. But our system now aggregates, so we can catch those spikes, too.”
Sportradar can’t take down the mafia, but it's working with people who can. After the Southern Stars scandal was exposed in conjunction with Australian police forces, more law enforcement agencies got involved: Europol are partners and Interpol are close collaborators.
“The floodgates opened, because forces realised that our system isn’t witchcraft,” says Ian. Sportradar now helps to educate police worldwide, free of charge. It has even developed the system to the point where it identified a way to single out specific individual bets that disrupt odds, so law enforcers can follow up those accounts.
A number of countries are also setting up national platforms to fight the problem and share their resources, with Sportradar offering crucial insight once again. Making major arrests will always be complicated, though. The evidence required for criminal convictions (‘beyond reasonable doubt’) is greater than that needed for sporting sanctions (‘to comfortable satisfaction’).
“Sports organisations can ban people but they can’t put them in prison,” says Ian. “Our FDS is good at pinpointing who’s executing a fix, but the problem is they’re footsoldiers – a 17-year-old kid who made a mistake and can’t get out of the web he’s in. We want the puppetmasters.”
As a result, Sportradar now has a specialist group, set up by a former British military counter-intelligence operative, attempting to join the dots in these international crimes. The more information they share, the more criminal cases they can get across the line. This means careful vetting of who works for Sportradar, too.
“We need to check the background of employees,” says Ian. “We need to be wary if someone seems lenient. None of our analysts are allowed to bet, and our level of encryption is extremely high. All our servers are in-house, we have no information on the cloud and we’re quiet on social media. We know we’re causing a headache for people who could make a lot of money, so we might be targeted.”
The big question many football supporters might want to ask, alas, remains unanswered. How much match-fixing takes place in - for example - the Premier League?
“Worth a try,” laughs Ian. “Sadly, I can’t talk about any specific league.” He will discuss the game’s relative vulnerability, however. “It is quite difficult to fix. Something like tennis is easier. There, you can even have a match that’s arranged, but somehow appears fair to the players. We agree that I’ll win the first set, you win the second set, and then we play for real in the third. It’s still the best man wins, and we both get to bet.”
While there’s a different algorithm for the Premier League as opposed to the Croatian third division, to reflect profile and bet spend, we shouldn't assume that the biggest names are not involved. “Rich people can have gambling debts and can be sleeping with the wrong people,” says Ian. “They can be vulnerable. It may be easier to fix a badminton match, but how much liquidity is in the badminton market? Not much. Football has plenty of liquidity.”
It’s almost time to leave Sportradar’s nerve centre when an alert pops up: there’s some suspicious activity in a southern European clash. Our analyst – let’s call him Bob – guides us through several screens. An Asian betting company is offering bafflingly low odds on there being another goal scored, despite it being the 88th minute of the match. Some wild punts are clearly being made. The fix is in, we decide, and watch the closing moments play out on a digital screen. But nothing happens. Bob concludes that this is likely to end up designated as a ‘failed fix’ – a possible dodgy deal that didn’t work. Paperwork will be filed.
A former professional gambler, Bob got into this gig after frequently getting foiled by some of the dubious odds movements he now fights. “I enjoy getting to see it all,” he says. And he still goes home to watch football after work.
Ian admits his work can leave him “disenchanted”, though. “The point of sport is the unpredictability of a result, and the honesty of the battle,” he says. “But this is the world we live in.” Until things change radically, Sportradar will keep following the money.
A European club win the first leg of a Champions League match by a large margin. With their progress assured, it’s arranged for them to concede late in the second fixture. With three minutes left, their defence switches off. A ball is punted upfield and a forward heads it goalward. The goalkeeper barely attempts a save.
Fixers arrange for a group of English sixth-tier players to join a club on the other side of the world. Unquestioningly accepted by the new employers, a previously solid side suddenly start losing, and heavily. A young goalkeeper in central Europe is befriended by a rich man. He gets him into clubs, gets him girls and treats him like a rock star. A family debt is soon paid off. Later, he asks him to concede a goal in a friendly game. Who would that harm? This is then used as leverage against him to commit more significant on-field fraud.
There are numerous ways to fix a match. Some are simple, others are sophisticated and barely believable. But when the true beauty of sport is its unpredictability, how on earth is it possible to prove if odd behaviour is down to human error or something a lot more sinister? How can all the above scenarios get busted? Just follow the money.
You’ve probably never heard of Sportradar, and despite the company kindly agreeing to a feature in FourFourTwo, it’s quite happy that way. We’ve stopped by its London offices – it has 34 worldwide, with 1,900 employees – under the condition that we don’t disclose the location, or use any real names.
If this seems like the paranoia of a counter-intelligence unit, that’s because it is. As the world’s foremost experts in betting-related fraud and sports corruption, Sportradar is not mucking around. The people they’re battling against include many international mafias, who often see gambling as a good way to launder money. Death threats were issued to UEFA inspectors in February after the exposure of Albanian outfit Skenderbeu’s involvement in fixing, and a member of the Nepal side appeared to threaten Sportradar’s team after players were put on trial for throwing a match.
Some of the figures involved in the worldwide gambling industry are gobsmacking: an estimated €1.5 trillion a year, with a game like the Champions League final attracting around €1 billion in bets (with 70% of this punting going on in Asia, much of it being unregulated, such figures can never be exact).
As our Sportradar spokesman Ian (not his real name) explains to us: “People don’t realise how big the international market is, and there’s no real way of knowing how big exactly. But it’s a crap-ton of money.”
So how do you go about monitoring such an unwieldy beast? Data, data and more data. Sportradar was started in 2001 by Carsten Koerl (his real name), a German entrepreneur who helped to establish online betting company Bwin.
Koerl recognised that internet gambling would produce a plethora of new bookmakers, but that many would lack the expertise to set odds accurately. A reputable service provider would be needed, and this was Betradar – the part of Sportradar that sells industry-leading information to turf accountants worldwide.
The ‘integrity services’ part arrived in 2005 as a by-product. “Whatever you need to operate a bookie, we can deliver,” says Ian. “But as part of our relationship with the betting industry, we get their information back. It soon became clear that by using this, we can see when bookmakers move away from the rest of the market. It always happens for a reason.”
What many casual punters might not realise is that while odds partly reflect how likely something is to happen, they also reflect bookmakers balancing risk. So if a big amount of money comes in on Crewe to beat Exeter, operators may compensate by offering more attractive odds on Exeter to beat Crewe, to cover potential losses. By the same reasoning, if a fixing group are betting big on a late goal being scored with a certain operator, that bookie will alter its odds to reflect this.
“If one bookmaker is getting a lot of money on something that nobody else is, there can be many innocent reasons,” says Ian. “Maybe they’ve got some injury information earlier than everyone else or they’ve got an excellent analyst – or maybe the bookie’s got it wrong that day, so they realise their mistake and adjust.”
But if one of the 550-plus online gambling companies that Sportradar work with suddenly offers prices that deviate wildly, it can be a smoking gun for match-fixing. “If a lot of people bet on something with unnatural confidence, it could be because someone’s engineered the result.”
The company therefore developed the Fraud Detection System (FDS) – an algorithm that scans 280,000 competitive fixtures annually across 17 sports looking for anomalies. “The algorithms don’t ask questions, they create alerts,” says Ian. “So we need a second stage, called qualitative analysis. This is our team of more than 100 experts. They work 24/7. As soon as an alert pops up, they have 72 hours to determine whether it is a legitimate or suspicious betting pattern.”
The number crunchers carry out their research, chatting to a network of bookmakers and journalists if required. “Maybe our person out there on the ground knows that it was the captain’s birthday so everyone got drunk,” says Ian. “We look at all options. You can’t just say: ‘This is fixing’. You’d be destroying reputations. We’re not a machine gun, we’re a sniper rifle. When we shoot, we get it right. We always start with the betting patterns, but it takes more than that to be credible.”
Sportradar only escalates an incident when it is 100% sure of foul play. To date, this has included 3,800 sports fixtures. The figure has climbed from 146 in 2009 to 650 last year.
This rise reflects more games being surveyed rather than an increase in criminality: Ian estimates that 0.5% to 1% of the matches they monitor are affected. As a result, Sportradar reports have been used in 36 criminal convictions and 251 sporting sanctions (suspensions, bans and fines) to date, with more on the docket.
Sportradar’s experience has provided a unique insight into how fixing works. “It’s not generally some guy bowling up and saying, ‘Here’s 50k, please lose 5-0’,” adds Ian. “Fixers usually groom players and officials. They take time, do them favours and entertain them. Then they’ll call in the favours. And once you do something for them they say: ‘You’ve just fixed a match for me, now you’re my bitch’. Prostitutes or drugs can be used as leverage, while older players are sometimes used to influence and recruit younger ones.”
Often at the core of these shady dealings are large criminal groups. “The Balkan, Italian and Asian mafia are involved,” explains Ian. “The owners of clubs can also be criminals. They tell players: ‘Unfortunately you’re going to lose today’. In some places, players don’t ask questions if they value their kneecaps.”
Fixers can even arrange fixtures. Notorious Singaporean super-fixer Wilson Raj Perumal organised numerous friendlies, for which he would pick the referee. “There’s a preponderance of rigged friendlies, because there’s nothing on the line and participants are more willing to agree,” says Ian. Referees are a common target. “They control the result pretty closely, especially if the fixers are betting on total goals. You don’t care who scores them, you just care that there are three or four. So you dish out some penalties.”
This proved the undoing of Ghana’s Joseph Lamptey, who was caught trying to influence goals scored in a World Cup qualifier between South Africa and Senegal last year. His decision to blow for a penalty after the ball hit Senegal defender Kalidou Koulibaly on the knee was ridiculous, but it’s the kind of blunder referees often make. It was the algorithm that caught him. FIFA – a Sportradar partner – decided to replay a World Cup qualifier due to fixing for the first time, and Lamptey was banned for life.
Perumal’s syndicate was involved in the 2013 Southern Stars scandal. Four players and a coach from the Melbourne club were convicted, along with a Malaysian fixer. English players were involved in play so obviously suspect that their opponents regularly questioned what was happening.
“I was panicking, getting a call when we were losing 2-0 and the boss saying this better f**king happen,” defender Reiss Noel told police about one game. “I felt threatened as we weren’t getting the goals required.” Sportradar’s algorithm had again alerted the authorities, and Noel and a team-mate, goalkeeper Joe Woolley, were banned for life by FIFA after admitting helping to fix matches.
“These guys weren’t exactly brain surgeons,” says Ian. “Police were at the game, and you’ve got a fixer on the phone actually speaking to one player, and him then saying to the goalkeeper: ‘We need to let another in’. Sometimes the footage you watch of keepers jumping the wrong way is almost comical.”
However, there’s also a degree of cat-and-mouse between Sportradar and criminals that wouldn’t look out of place in The Wire. “A few years ago someone realised you don’t even need to manipulate a performance to fix a match – you can just manipulate the concept of a performance,” explains Ian. This led to the extraordinary phenomenon of ‘ghost games’, in which entire matches were faked.
“In order for bookmakers to cover football, they simply need data on what is happening. So it was created from nothing – they sent through details about imaginary goals being scored after they had bet on them.”
Among the games that never kicked off included Maldives Under-21s against Turkmenistan Under-21s from 2012, and Portugal’s Freamunde against Spain’s Ponferradina in 2014. “People innovate – it’s like doping,” says Ian. “We’ve also had some fixers trying not to disrupt the odds by spreading a bet across lots of bookies. But our system now aggregates, so we can catch those spikes, too.”
Sportradar can’t take down the mafia, but it's working with people who can. After the Southern Stars scandal was exposed in conjunction with Australian police forces, more law enforcement agencies got involved: Europol are partners and Interpol are close collaborators.
“The floodgates opened, because forces realised that our system isn’t witchcraft,” says Ian. Sportradar now helps to educate police worldwide, free of charge. It has even developed the system to the point where it identified a way to single out specific individual bets that disrupt odds, so law enforcers can follow up those accounts.
A number of countries are also setting up national platforms to fight the problem and share their resources, with Sportradar offering crucial insight once again. Making major arrests will always be complicated, though. The evidence required for criminal convictions (‘beyond reasonable doubt’) is greater than that needed for sporting sanctions (‘to comfortable satisfaction’).
“Sports organisations can ban people but they can’t put them in prison,” says Ian. “Our FDS is good at pinpointing who’s executing a fix, but the problem is they’re footsoldiers – a 17-year-old kid who made a mistake and can’t get out of the web he’s in. We want the puppetmasters.”
As a result, Sportradar now has a specialist group, set up by a former British military counter-intelligence operative, attempting to join the dots in these international crimes. The more information they share, the more criminal cases they can get across the line. This means careful vetting of who works for Sportradar, too.
“We need to check the background of employees,” says Ian. “We need to be wary if someone seems lenient. None of our analysts are allowed to bet, and our level of encryption is extremely high. All our servers are in-house, we have no information on the cloud and we’re quiet on social media. We know we’re causing a headache for people who could make a lot of money, so we might be targeted.”
The big question many football supporters might want to ask, alas, remains unanswered. How much match-fixing takes place in - for example - the Premier League?
“Worth a try,” laughs Ian. “Sadly, I can’t talk about any specific league.” He will discuss the game’s relative vulnerability, however. “It is quite difficult to fix. Something like tennis is easier. There, you can even have a match that’s arranged, but somehow appears fair to the players. We agree that I’ll win the first set, you win the second set, and then we play for real in the third. It’s still the best man wins, and we both get to bet.”
While there’s a different algorithm for the Premier League as opposed to the Croatian third division, to reflect profile and bet spend, we shouldn't assume that the biggest names are not involved. “Rich people can have gambling debts and can be sleeping with the wrong people,” says Ian. “They can be vulnerable. It may be easier to fix a badminton match, but how much liquidity is in the badminton market? Not much. Football has plenty of liquidity.”
It’s almost time to leave Sportradar’s nerve centre when an alert pops up: there’s some suspicious activity in a southern European clash. Our analyst – let’s call him Bob – guides us through several screens. An Asian betting company is offering bafflingly low odds on there being another goal scored, despite it being the 88th minute of the match. Some wild punts are clearly being made. The fix is in, we decide, and watch the closing moments play out on a digital screen. But nothing happens. Bob concludes that this is likely to end up designated as a ‘failed fix’ – a possible dodgy deal that didn’t work. Paperwork will be filed.
A former professional gambler, Bob got into this gig after frequently getting foiled by some of the dubious odds movements he now fights. “I enjoy getting to see it all,” he says. And he still goes home to watch football after work.
Ian admits his work can leave him “disenchanted”, though. “The point of sport is the unpredictability of a result, and the honesty of the battle,” he says. “But this is the world we live in.” Until things change radically, Sportradar will keep following the money.
January 06, 2019
YouTube stars promoted gambling to kids. Now they have to answer to their peers.
Popular YouTubers like Jake Paul and Bryan “RiceGum” Le promoted a shady gambling website to their millions of subscribers, many of whom are children. And now they’re in the middle of a debate about the ethics and the responsibility that come with legions of young, highly impressionable superfans.
On December 30, Jake Paul, the younger brother of Logan Paul, who made headlines around this time last year for videotaping a suicide victim, published a video that looked exactly like many others on YouTube: a bait-y thumbnail (Paul’s stupefied expression surrounded by cutouts of objects, numbers, and random punctuation marks) with a comically hyperbolic title: “I Spent $5,000 ON MYSTERY BOXES & You WONT Believe What I Got (insane).”
The difference is that the video is an ad, which Paul disclosed in the video’s description, for Mystery Brand, a website where users pay different amounts of money — anywhere from a few bucks to $299 — to open digital boxes. There are “hypebeast” boxes, gaming boxes, boxes that only contain different types of watches, and even holiday-themed boxes, which might be filled with a 27-inch iMac, a Chanel purse, Off-White sneakers, or a Supreme jacket. More likely though, you’ll end up with a fidget spinner, or in the case of the Chanel box, which costs $99 to open, a vial of Chanel nail polish (retail price: $28).
A Daily Beast report Wednesday stated that some boxes claimed to include items like Lamborghini sports cars, Ferraris, and “The Most Expensive Los Angeles Realty $250,000,000” (which was actually a photo of a Bel Air mansion listed for $188 million that is not owned by Mystery Brand and therefore was not its to give away), though these items no longer appear to be available in any of the boxes currently on the site.
Even on a surface level, it’s pretty clear that Mystery Brand is shady — and that, along with the fact that many of the creators promoting it have an audience largely made up of children, is why many, many YouTubers have formed a chorus of criticism against Paul, RiceGum, and others.
According to its terms and conditions, Mystery Brand seems to be operated out of Poland. (“These terms are interpreted and are subject to the jurisdiction and the laws of Poland.”) And use of the website is “strictly prohibited for persons under 13 or persons not reached the age of majority.” It also says that those under “the age of majority” may not be eligible to receive the prizes they’ve won.
Elsewhere, however, it states that any user may not receive the items they’ve won, and according to reports, that’s exactly what’s happened. Multiple Reddit threads devoted to demystifying Mystery Brand show customers claiming that products have taken months to ship, if they ever do at all; that tracking numbers don’t work; or that they were forced to pay upward of $40 for shipping.
But there are infinite retail scams on the internet for YouTubers to promote. The problem for many is that despite YouTube’s strict gambling policies (advertisements may not promote gambling in areas where it is illegal, nor to minors), it doesn’t seem to classify Mystery Brand’s digital betting game as gambling. And Jake Paul, for instance, has gone on the record to say that his target audience is children between the ages of 8 and 16.
YouTube, meanwhile, is mostly concerned with creators clearly labeling their content as sponsored — which both Jake Paul and RiceGum did. The company gave the following statement to Vox:
It’s unclear whether or not the Federal Trade Commission, which sets regulations for sponsored content and advertising, is concerned with YouTubers promoting gambling websites to minors — an inquiry from Vox to the FTC came back with an automatic reply that the organization was closed due to the partial government shutdown.
RiceGum, for his part, did apologize in a video after YouTube’s most-subscribed star, PewDiePie, and Ethan Klein of h3h3 Productions called him out in their own videos covering the drama (although not before complaining that other YouTubers with largely young followings — the channel Reaction Zoom, Zane Hijazi, and Guava Juice among them — also promoted Mystery Brand within the last few months).
The YouTubers criticizing these channels’ promotion of Mystery Brand have focused both on the scamminess of the website itself as well as the responsibility that comes with having millions of young followers — both topics that have been lightning rods in YouTube drama over the past few years. PewDiePie in particular has been criticized for amplifying anti-Semitic rhetoric to his own young audience.
With fewer ad dollars floating around YouTube, some creators have turned to shadier dealings, like in the case of the recent controversy surrounding beauty bloggers being paid by cosmetics companies to post negative reviews about rival brands’ products. And it’s nothing compared to the debate about what duty the biggest YouTuber in the world has in making sure his content doesn’t encourage teenagers to view beliefs embraced by the alt-right as hilarious satire.
But the rewards for YouTubers who promote sites like Mystery Brand are too high for many of them to pass up. Creators like PewDiePie and Keemstar have both confirmed that they’d turned down huge sums of money to promote Mystery Brand or similar sites; Keemstar, for instance, said on Twitter he was offered $100,000 to promote it, while in his apology video Ricegum implied that his fee was much higher.
The experience of using Mystery Brand — the big bet, the thrill of opening a box, and the payoff of actually seeing the prizes IRL — has all the ingredients of a successful YouTube video.
Not only is it a form of digital unboxing, one of the site’s most lucrative tropes, but the idea of the surprise box stems from gaming culture, where players pay money to open loot boxes full of skins, weapons, and other virtual swag. (Loot boxes, incidentally, were the subject of their own Mystery Brand-like scandal in 2016, when the popular Twitch streamer James “Phantoml0rd” Varga promoted a website where users could gamble for weapon skins in the game Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and was banned after he was accused of secretly owning it.)
Similarly, those who promoted Mystery Brand have been widely suspected to have enjoyed false odds — many YouTubers have come to the conclusion that Mystery Brand knows exactly when someone like Paul or RiceGum is playing so that they’ll end up with one of its high-quality prizes.
“They’re just desperate for money and views,” YouTube creator Antonio Chavez told The Verge. “The channels have been going down for a while now, as far as analytics go. Their channels are big channels still, but they’re used to this kind of money — maybe six figure sponsorships all the time — and when they see that going down, they’ll take any kind of sponsorship.”
YouTube stresses that the responsibility for transparency in advertising lies with the creator, but some have criticized the company for allowing users to be misled. One artist whose avatar artwork was stolen by Mystery Brand told The Verge that “It’s amazing that YouTube can defend it at all. It’s the same as, ‘All the evidence might point to Russian collusion but let’s give them the benefit of the doubt.’”
Mystery Brand is what happens when a bunch of YouTube trends converge: a decrease in ad dollars, thereby encouraging creators to take on paid promotions no matter how sketchy; the dopamine rush of the unboxing video; and enough controversy for every YouTube creator to publish their own reaction video. And if it’s like most YouTube drama, the betting odds are high that it’s just getting started.
On December 30, Jake Paul, the younger brother of Logan Paul, who made headlines around this time last year for videotaping a suicide victim, published a video that looked exactly like many others on YouTube: a bait-y thumbnail (Paul’s stupefied expression surrounded by cutouts of objects, numbers, and random punctuation marks) with a comically hyperbolic title: “I Spent $5,000 ON MYSTERY BOXES & You WONT Believe What I Got (insane).”
The difference is that the video is an ad, which Paul disclosed in the video’s description, for Mystery Brand, a website where users pay different amounts of money — anywhere from a few bucks to $299 — to open digital boxes. There are “hypebeast” boxes, gaming boxes, boxes that only contain different types of watches, and even holiday-themed boxes, which might be filled with a 27-inch iMac, a Chanel purse, Off-White sneakers, or a Supreme jacket. More likely though, you’ll end up with a fidget spinner, or in the case of the Chanel box, which costs $99 to open, a vial of Chanel nail polish (retail price: $28).
A Daily Beast report Wednesday stated that some boxes claimed to include items like Lamborghini sports cars, Ferraris, and “The Most Expensive Los Angeles Realty $250,000,000” (which was actually a photo of a Bel Air mansion listed for $188 million that is not owned by Mystery Brand and therefore was not its to give away), though these items no longer appear to be available in any of the boxes currently on the site.
Even on a surface level, it’s pretty clear that Mystery Brand is shady — and that, along with the fact that many of the creators promoting it have an audience largely made up of children, is why many, many YouTubers have formed a chorus of criticism against Paul, RiceGum, and others.
According to its terms and conditions, Mystery Brand seems to be operated out of Poland. (“These terms are interpreted and are subject to the jurisdiction and the laws of Poland.”) And use of the website is “strictly prohibited for persons under 13 or persons not reached the age of majority.” It also says that those under “the age of majority” may not be eligible to receive the prizes they’ve won.
Elsewhere, however, it states that any user may not receive the items they’ve won, and according to reports, that’s exactly what’s happened. Multiple Reddit threads devoted to demystifying Mystery Brand show customers claiming that products have taken months to ship, if they ever do at all; that tracking numbers don’t work; or that they were forced to pay upward of $40 for shipping.
But there are infinite retail scams on the internet for YouTubers to promote. The problem for many is that despite YouTube’s strict gambling policies (advertisements may not promote gambling in areas where it is illegal, nor to minors), it doesn’t seem to classify Mystery Brand’s digital betting game as gambling. And Jake Paul, for instance, has gone on the record to say that his target audience is children between the ages of 8 and 16.
YouTube, meanwhile, is mostly concerned with creators clearly labeling their content as sponsored — which both Jake Paul and RiceGum did. The company gave the following statement to Vox:
YouTube believes that creators should be transparent with their audiences if their content includes paid promotion of any kind. Our policies make it clear that YouTube creators are responsible for ensuring their content complies with local laws, regulations and YouTube Community Guidelines. If content is found to violate these policies, we take action to ensure the integrity of our platform, which can include removing content.
It’s unclear whether or not the Federal Trade Commission, which sets regulations for sponsored content and advertising, is concerned with YouTubers promoting gambling websites to minors — an inquiry from Vox to the FTC came back with an automatic reply that the organization was closed due to the partial government shutdown.
RiceGum, for his part, did apologize in a video after YouTube’s most-subscribed star, PewDiePie, and Ethan Klein of h3h3 Productions called him out in their own videos covering the drama (although not before complaining that other YouTubers with largely young followings — the channel Reaction Zoom, Zane Hijazi, and Guava Juice among them — also promoted Mystery Brand within the last few months).
The YouTubers criticizing these channels’ promotion of Mystery Brand have focused both on the scamminess of the website itself as well as the responsibility that comes with having millions of young followers — both topics that have been lightning rods in YouTube drama over the past few years. PewDiePie in particular has been criticized for amplifying anti-Semitic rhetoric to his own young audience.
With fewer ad dollars floating around YouTube, some creators have turned to shadier dealings, like in the case of the recent controversy surrounding beauty bloggers being paid by cosmetics companies to post negative reviews about rival brands’ products. And it’s nothing compared to the debate about what duty the biggest YouTuber in the world has in making sure his content doesn’t encourage teenagers to view beliefs embraced by the alt-right as hilarious satire.
But the rewards for YouTubers who promote sites like Mystery Brand are too high for many of them to pass up. Creators like PewDiePie and Keemstar have both confirmed that they’d turned down huge sums of money to promote Mystery Brand or similar sites; Keemstar, for instance, said on Twitter he was offered $100,000 to promote it, while in his apology video Ricegum implied that his fee was much higher.
The experience of using Mystery Brand — the big bet, the thrill of opening a box, and the payoff of actually seeing the prizes IRL — has all the ingredients of a successful YouTube video.
Not only is it a form of digital unboxing, one of the site’s most lucrative tropes, but the idea of the surprise box stems from gaming culture, where players pay money to open loot boxes full of skins, weapons, and other virtual swag. (Loot boxes, incidentally, were the subject of their own Mystery Brand-like scandal in 2016, when the popular Twitch streamer James “Phantoml0rd” Varga promoted a website where users could gamble for weapon skins in the game Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and was banned after he was accused of secretly owning it.)
Similarly, those who promoted Mystery Brand have been widely suspected to have enjoyed false odds — many YouTubers have come to the conclusion that Mystery Brand knows exactly when someone like Paul or RiceGum is playing so that they’ll end up with one of its high-quality prizes.
“They’re just desperate for money and views,” YouTube creator Antonio Chavez told The Verge. “The channels have been going down for a while now, as far as analytics go. Their channels are big channels still, but they’re used to this kind of money — maybe six figure sponsorships all the time — and when they see that going down, they’ll take any kind of sponsorship.”
YouTube stresses that the responsibility for transparency in advertising lies with the creator, but some have criticized the company for allowing users to be misled. One artist whose avatar artwork was stolen by Mystery Brand told The Verge that “It’s amazing that YouTube can defend it at all. It’s the same as, ‘All the evidence might point to Russian collusion but let’s give them the benefit of the doubt.’”
Mystery Brand is what happens when a bunch of YouTube trends converge: a decrease in ad dollars, thereby encouraging creators to take on paid promotions no matter how sketchy; the dopamine rush of the unboxing video; and enough controversy for every YouTube creator to publish their own reaction video. And if it’s like most YouTube drama, the betting odds are high that it’s just getting started.
January 03, 2019
Denmark gambling regulator hails success against illegal market
Denmark’s regulated online gambling market has resulted in a “limited” market for illegal gambling operators, although social media gambling and skin betting remain a problem.
A new report by Denmark’s Spillemyndigheden regulatory agency claims that the number of unauthorized gambling sites offering services to local gamblers without local permission identified remains “continuously low.”
Through December 2018, Spillemyndigheden conducted three web searches to identify illegal gambling operators and sites promoting such operations. These searches identified 742 possibly problematic websites, more than twice the number identified in 2017, although Spillemyndigheden noted that the 2018 searches were “broader than usual to ensure that previously legal sites have not changed their contents.”
These 742 problematic sites resulted in 22 petitions sent to the website operators notifying them of their violation of the Danish Act on Gambling. Spillemyndigheden eventually ordered local internet service providers to block 18 of the offending gambling sites who failed to respond to these petitions.
While the number of petitions sent to rogue operators was below the 31 notices issued in 2017, the 18 domain-blocking orders was the highest since 2012 – the year Denmark launched its regulated online market – when 20 orders were issued. In fact, four of the five previous years had seen zero domains blocked by local ISPs. However, 2018’s numbers were goosed by a February court decision that overruled the ISP’s objections to Spillemyndigheden’s orders.
Spillemyndigheden’s web searches similarly identified 95 potentially problematic eSports ‘skin betting’ sites, which led to 17 petitions and six blocking orders. The regulator said it expects an additional 20-25 skin betting sites will be included in the next batch of blocking orders sent to ISPs.
Spillemyndigheden also sounded the alarm regarding illegal gambling via Facebook groups, usually in the form of lotteries that compete with the local monopoly. Four such Facebook groups were closed in 2018 following “a cooperation” with the social network.
Denmark’s regulated online gambling market has been hailed as a model for other European markets to follow, i.e. not capping the number of online licensees and allowing licensees to offer a wide range of gambling products. The online market set a new quarterly revenue record this summer, thanks in part to the 2018 FIFA World Cup, which Spillemyndigheden holds up as further evidence of its enforcement efforts.
A new report by Denmark’s Spillemyndigheden regulatory agency claims that the number of unauthorized gambling sites offering services to local gamblers without local permission identified remains “continuously low.”
Through December 2018, Spillemyndigheden conducted three web searches to identify illegal gambling operators and sites promoting such operations. These searches identified 742 possibly problematic websites, more than twice the number identified in 2017, although Spillemyndigheden noted that the 2018 searches were “broader than usual to ensure that previously legal sites have not changed their contents.”
These 742 problematic sites resulted in 22 petitions sent to the website operators notifying them of their violation of the Danish Act on Gambling. Spillemyndigheden eventually ordered local internet service providers to block 18 of the offending gambling sites who failed to respond to these petitions.
While the number of petitions sent to rogue operators was below the 31 notices issued in 2017, the 18 domain-blocking orders was the highest since 2012 – the year Denmark launched its regulated online market – when 20 orders were issued. In fact, four of the five previous years had seen zero domains blocked by local ISPs. However, 2018’s numbers were goosed by a February court decision that overruled the ISP’s objections to Spillemyndigheden’s orders.
Spillemyndigheden’s web searches similarly identified 95 potentially problematic eSports ‘skin betting’ sites, which led to 17 petitions and six blocking orders. The regulator said it expects an additional 20-25 skin betting sites will be included in the next batch of blocking orders sent to ISPs.
Spillemyndigheden also sounded the alarm regarding illegal gambling via Facebook groups, usually in the form of lotteries that compete with the local monopoly. Four such Facebook groups were closed in 2018 following “a cooperation” with the social network.
Denmark’s regulated online gambling market has been hailed as a model for other European markets to follow, i.e. not capping the number of online licensees and allowing licensees to offer a wide range of gambling products. The online market set a new quarterly revenue record this summer, thanks in part to the 2018 FIFA World Cup, which Spillemyndigheden holds up as further evidence of its enforcement efforts.
January 02, 2019
Playtech reaches £25 million deal with Israeli tax authorities
Playtech has agreed to pay Israeli authorities approximately £25 million following a civil tax audit assessing its activity in the country between 2008 and 2017.
The gambling software company confirmed this morning that it had reached a settlement on 31 December 2018, after acknowledging that the Israeli tax authorities had made “transfer pricing adjustments in relation to certain functions”.
The payment, expected to be made in the next 30 days, will be reflected as an exceptional item in the firm’s 2018 accounts. No further penalties are to be imposed as a result of the audit.
The news closes a turbulent year for Playtech, who now expect to take an earnings hit of up to €25 million (£22.5 million) in 2019 due to changes in Italy’s gambling taxes.
Online casino revenues will be taxed at 25% (up from 20%), while online sports betting will be subjected to a 2% increase from 22 to 24%. This is on top of the advertising ban, announced as part of the Lega-5 Star government’s ‘Dignity Decree’.
Playtech had moved to offset falling revenues in Asia by completing the acquisition of Italian betting group Snaitech for approximately €850 million in June of last year.
The gambling software company confirmed this morning that it had reached a settlement on 31 December 2018, after acknowledging that the Israeli tax authorities had made “transfer pricing adjustments in relation to certain functions”.
The payment, expected to be made in the next 30 days, will be reflected as an exceptional item in the firm’s 2018 accounts. No further penalties are to be imposed as a result of the audit.
The news closes a turbulent year for Playtech, who now expect to take an earnings hit of up to €25 million (£22.5 million) in 2019 due to changes in Italy’s gambling taxes.
Online casino revenues will be taxed at 25% (up from 20%), while online sports betting will be subjected to a 2% increase from 22 to 24%. This is on top of the advertising ban, announced as part of the Lega-5 Star government’s ‘Dignity Decree’.
Playtech had moved to offset falling revenues in Asia by completing the acquisition of Italian betting group Snaitech for approximately €850 million in June of last year.
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