The International Betting Integrity Association’s (IBIA) report on suspicious betting activity for Q3 2023 turned out to be a bit of a good news/bad news situation. On the good news side, the IBIA report shows that the number of overall suspicious wagers is dropping over time. The bad news is that a full 30 percent of all the suspicious wagers were made on tennis matches.
Over the course of Q3 2023, the IBIA was alerted to 50 incidents that originated from eight different sports on wagers placed in 21 different countries. According to the IBIA, 60 percent of those reports were based on events occurring somewhere on the European continent. That marks a 41 percent drop from the 85 suspicious betting incidents that were reported in Q3 of 2022.
Reports on suspicious tennis wagers were actually down seven percent over the previous quarter, but skyrocketed an astonishing 55 percent over Q3 2022. The IBIA didn’t speculate as to why the number of suspicious tennis wagers was on the rise, but mid and low-ranking tennis players are frequently targeted by organized to participate in match-fixing schemes. Though international tennis bodies have been battling this problem for quite a while, it remains an issue for the sport.
IBIA CEO Khalid Ali praised efforts by the tennis world to clean up the sport saying, “During the quarter, IBIA and the International Tennis Integrity Agency (ITIA) co-hosted a best practice integrity seminar in New York with many of the premier sports and betting operators in the US. That cross-sector cooperative approach underlines the strength of our relationship with tennis, as acknowledged by the ITIA, and our shared commitment to working in partnership to combat corruption in that sport.”