The release of the first quarter report of the Global Lottery Monitoring System tagged Europe as the continent most responsible for suspicious betting. A total of 323 unreported alerts were analyzed, with Europe chalking up 160 suspicious warnings.
Asia came in second with 66 alerts, with South America at 58, followed by North America, Africa and Oceania at 14, eight and seven warnings each.
Of the 160 in Europe, football racked up 94 alerts, the most of any sport. Second most belonged to basketball at 30. In total, football dominated the total number of alerts with 196, according to SBC News. Basketball at 56, esports at 40 and ice hockey at 15 followed.
“As sports events globally are starting up again, as seen with March
Madness in the U.S., we believe our lottery sports customers are going to have a great 2021,” said Jennifer Welshons, senior vice president of marketing of GLMS member organization Scientific Games.
Most of the alerts—188—were green ones, which meant less concerning. Another 67 were classified as yellow, while 13 got accorded red alerts, such as match fixing.
“The past year has presented exceptional challenges which have had a profound impact across the industry,” said Edward Peace, Managing Director of Sporting Solutions. “We worked hard on event and competition integrity, both internally and with external providers, to ensure new content that filled the Covid-19 void was is in line with our high standards.”
