At a United Nations conference on crime in Qatar, British gaming expert Patrick Jay said the worldwide sports betting market is worth up to trillion, but most of the money is made illegally.
According to Agence France Presse, around 65 percent of bets are placed on football, while tennis and cricket are responsible for 12 percent each. Asians are the biggest gamblers, Jay said at the U.N. Congress on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice in Doha, Qatar’s capital city. He added that the most conservative estimates for global sports betting is $1 trillion.
“The trillion is all global sports betting, of which the illegal amount would be 90 per cent of it,” he told AFP. “I’ll let you into a secret. I say the trillion figure because I can just about get away with it without being laughed off stage.”
