This year has been key for sports with football competitions in Africa, Europe and Latin America, the Olympic Games, and many important competitions around the world in athletics, basketball, cycling, tennis, swimming and more.
Online sports betting is booming, and more global jurisdictions are legalizing online sports betting. Innovative technologies enable a growing number of regulated lottery and sports betting operators to cover more sports and enhance their betting offers.
Sports must remain fair and clean, to protect stakeholders across the entire regulated sports and sports betting ecosystem.
Against this backdrop, the parallel session on Sport at WLS 2024 presented industry best practices, insights and knowledge, and measures to help protect WLA members from match fixing and illegal betting activities.
The session was moderated by Luca Esposito, WLA Executive Director, with panellists from WLA lottery and associate members Jean-Luc Moner-Banet, Director General at Loterie Suisse Romande; Runa Walia Dasai, Chief Marketing Officer at OpenBet, and Michael Fitzsimmons, Executive Director, Wagering products at the Hong Kong Jockey Club (HKJC).
WLA ramps up efforts to assist its members
More than half of WLA lottery members offer sports betting. Booming global illegal betting markets jeopardize our industry’s reputation, putting players at risk, reducing the amount of funds that support good causes and communities around the world.
In his introduction, Esposito emphasized that the transnational nature of the illegal sports betting markets, and increased match fixing, called for a global and united effort across our industry and greater community to combat these issues.
WLA activities include:
- WLA Betting Integrity on Sports & Horse Racing Committee (BISHRC) works with different stakeholders to raise awareness of the issues surrounding match fixing and maintaining sports integrity. It organizes and participates in events and projects, for instance, the ULIS Sports Integrity Seminar – this November in Lausanne, Switzerland
- The BISHRC is an active participant in the Council of Europe project for Addressing Competition’s Manipulation Together (ACT) and attended and presented our work at the Nov 2023 event in Morocco and the Aug 2024 event in Brazil.
- Given the growing illegal gambling, match-fixing, and sports corruption, estimating the size of the illegal betting and gaming market has become a key interest of WLA lottery and sports betting members, and the wider gaming industry in general. The WLA Illegal Lottery and Betting Committee (ILBC) initiated a project with the University of Lausanne to develop an effective way of estimating the size of illegal betting markets.
- WLA develops best practice guides and other resources for members, including: Protecting IP of multijurisdictional games and WLA Working definitions.
Overcoming challenges in French-speaking Switzerland
The Swiss French market offers betting on 30 sports, pre-match and live, via paper slips and a QR code. Moner-Banet explained that Loterie Romande must provide attractive and responsible games, control the age of all players (on- and offline), and redirect players from the illegal to the legal betting market.
Some prevention activities covered:
- Informing players of gaming risks as
- Systematic prevention messages in all communications
- Tax allocated to cantons to develop prevention programmes
- Mandatory training for all 2,400 points of sale to check age of players who appear to be under 25, and spot signs of at-risk behaviours
- Points of sale inspections
- Ending contracts with non-compliant retailers
- +18 logo systematically integrated into all commercial communications
- Prohibition on targeting youth population and ban on advertising where underage people can be found in numbers
Training, education and messaging were increased before the EURO football in 2024.
Commenting on effective measures to combat illegals in Switzerland, Moner-Banet noted the ban on advertising for illegal operators, who may also not sponsor sports clubs. He added that IP blocking was quite effective. When players faced a screen indicating they were about to enter an illegal site, and they should go to one of the legal sites, a certain percentage followed this guidance.
Technology partners aid lotteries
Dasai explained how a technology partner such as OpenBet, can play crucial role in helping lottery and sports betting operators combat match fixing and other illegal betting activities.
AI technologies greatly assist in the rapid monitoring of masses of data to establish player betting patterns and be able to recognize suspicious activities across games, such as micro-betting, manipulating results and fraud.
Other technologies such as digital payments have made it easier to detect, track and flag transactions related to illicit gaming.
Geolocation ensures bets are placed in approved locations, while AI and machine learning enable monitoring betting patterns in real time, to detect fraud or match fixing before it escalates.
Despite these advances, Dasai underscored the need for regulators, law enforcement, legal betting operators and tech providers to work closely together.
Tackling illegal gaming in Hong Kong
The Hong Kong Jockey Club is the sole licensed operator in Hong Kong, offering football, horse racing (controlled by HKJC), and the Mark Six lottery it operates on behalf of the government.
Fitzsimmons outlined three key strategies used to defeat the illegal markets in Hong Kong:
- License scope – improving data quality and understanding, which HKJC can share with regulators, directly impacts the scope of the license it can work within. Considering behavioural economics and scientific evidence on how customer behaviour will change in a scenario of complex choices will help the lottery’s position in these discussions.
- Customer centricity – by knowing the customers better than the illegal market does, HKJC can innovate within legal constraints, to keep customers and bring others back.
- Integrity – the legal betting market depends on sporting integrity. Customers must have confidence in the products they choose to wager in.
Fitzsimmons described how HKJC invests heavily in maintaining horse racing integrity. All races have full coverage. Jockeys, trainers or any involved parties may be asked to participate in inquiries. Confidence in horse racing is high in Hong Kong, where it outperforms the illegal market.
HKJC has developed an in-house match integrity detection model to closely monitor suspect matches of sports it does not control.
