Sportsradar is offering its Universal Fraud Detection System (UFDS) free of charge to sports federations and state gaming authorities. The move comes as the company reports a global surge in match fixing across a wide range of professional sports.
Officials at Sportsradar are alarmed at what they’ve been seeing on their systems over past 18 months and want to get more eyes looking for potential fraud. Since April, 2020, the company has logged more than 1,100 instances of suspicious activity in global sporting events across 70 countries.
Although match-fixing occurs in every sport from table tennis to basketball, company officials say its most prevalent in football. A full 40 percent of the instances of potential fraud they’ve identified come from that one sport alone.
Though match-fixing does occur at the national level, a full 40 percent of the events Sportsradar logged come from lower-tier and youth soccer.
Sportsradar officials believe that offering free fraud detection to sports federations and governments is a win-win situation. “This is really a free-of-charge service,” he says. “Consider it as a free burglar alarm for your house – for all doors, all windows, the cellar, for break-ins and for fires,” Sportsradar managing director Andreas Krannich said in a statment reported on by iGaming Business.
He doesn’t think that banning wagering on low level leagues has much of an impact on fraud saying, “If you try to enforce prohibition, those activities not only just go underground. The serious consequences are that there is a total lack of enforcement and oversight to uphold any sort of integrity. Black markets are created.”
Krannich left sports betting operators with a stark warning that match-fixing is a “cancer” and a “global threat.”