The Potential For Betting Fraud In A Legalized Sports Betting Market
As Sports Betting Draws Nearer To Legalization In The States, We Need To Take A Closer Look To The Prevalence Of Betting Fraud
With the possibility of legal sports betting in the US now actually on the horizon, legislators and other involved parties need to be turning their focus to betting fraud, and how to combat it.
Representative Frank Pallone of New Jersey has doggedly been fighting for legal sports betting, introducing new legislation over the years. This year, he has introduced a discussion draft of a bill that would more than likely be called the GAME Act. In it, he included a subsection called the Prevention of Cheating. It addresses the issue like point-shaving and game-fixing.
“Prevention of Cheating – Appropriate safeguards to ensure, to a reasonable degree of certainty, that a bet or wager is fair and honest, and to prevent, to a reasonable degree of certainty, cheating (including collusion and the use of a cheating device).”
And while a clause and provision of this nature would be expected to be included in such a bill, it really only addresses issues of cheating that are, for lack of a better term, obvious and easily spotted. The issue of betting fraud, however, is a much more silent killer. According to legal experts Ryan Rodenberg and Jack Kerr, “In many cases, betting fraud leaves no trace on the field of play, and the sporting event is usually unaffected.”
Betting fraud became prevalent by mimicking stock market fraud, wherein traders would share fake news either to drive the price up or down. They would then either short sell their shares or sell them when they were high (depending on the route they took with the fake news) and make their profit that way.
Sports Betting fraud does this by circulating fake news that a team is about to get better or worse by trading or acquiring a high profile player, or by circulating a fake roster with an influential starter scratched, so it looks like they won’t play in a certain match. This would affect how people bet on the game, driving odds up on one side or the other and causing people to lose their wagers, while also giving inside information to the people who were in on the fraud.
While one or even several reports with falsified information could easily be disproven, it would be hard to fight a large enough influx of information directly before a match or game. The only good thing about betting fraud is that it can’t go on for very long. “The most important fact about betting markets is they are self-correcting. When inefficiencies occur, they are ruthlessly exploited.” This is according to David Walsh, an Australian Mathematician who studies probabilistic betting.
Unfortunately, this doesn’t do much for the people who have already been defrauded, but experts agree that this isn’t a long-term problem and would die out soon enough, equating it with an early bug in a burgeoning system that could theoretically be wiped out after one or two incidents.
LegalGamblingUSA knows there is another, more prevalent problem, however. Corrupt Data Scouts. These are the people who update stats and information on games while the match is happening. They basically control the outcome of in-game wagering.
So dirty data scouts could delay information coming in enough for their cohorts to place a bet after they know what happens. It doesn’t even take that long – 30 seconds at most. It’s sneakier and more profitable than point shaving or having a referee in your pocket, and is virtually undetectable, because who would notice a 30-second delay in information being input? This is an especially large problem in soccer and tennis matches, although theoretically, it could occur with any sport. He who controls the flow of information controls the game.
It would be easy enough to spot after the fact, but almost impossible to determine where it would happen next, creating a network of potentially fraudulent activity with no perceivable way to end it. They would, for all intents and purposes, be like ghosts, haunting the system.
If sports betting were to become legalized in the United States, experts and lawmakers would have to create legislation that prevents betting fraud – in a much more encompassing manner than what they’ve included in the GAME act. They’ll need to invest in forensic sports analysts, who would be able to study and monitor this rise in betting fraud and develop ways to combat it. They would study both live betting odds and play by play data, in an effort to prevent betting fraud.
“All you need to watch for is a major difference between where the lines are and where the true prices should be,” experts say. But is it really that easy to catch a ghost?
| Legal Betting Sites | Bonuses | Features | Visit Site |
|---|---|---|---|
 |
50% - $250 | Casino Games | |
 |
50% - $1,000 | Poker / Casino Games | |
 |
50% - $1,000 | Poker / Casino Games | |
 |
100% - $500 | Poker / Casino Games | |
 |
50% - $520 | Live Dealer Casino |