Sportradar Integrity Services, a unit of Sportradar, has published its annual report, Betting Corruption and Match Fixing 2023, detailing the company’s findings on suspicious betting in global sport.
The report was based on monitoring approximately 850,000 events and games across 70 sports. There were a total of 1,329 suspicious games in 2023, taking place in 11 sports in 105 countries.
Suspicious cases in betting remain stable according to Sportradar
Compared to 2022, the data indicates that the rate of suspected manipulation across all sports has remained stable. It was 0.21%, or one in every 467 games in 2023.
Thus, the analysis did not flag any sport with a proportion of suspicious games greater than 1%. Therefore, 99.5% of monitored sporting events had no suspicious bets detected.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) helped detect almost 3/4 (73% or 977 instances) of all suspicious matches in 2023. This represented a 123% increase compared to 2022.
While the integration of AI into Sportradar’s Universal Fraud Detection System (UFDS) has boosted rate detection, analysis from integrity experts is essential to ensure accurate interpretation of data.
Sportradar report contributed to several sporting sanctions
Key takeaways in 2023:
- Being the most popular sport in the world for betting, football continued to be the most affected by match fixing, with 880 suspected games. Then it was basketball, with 205 games, and in 3rd place was table tennis, with 70 games.
- Information collected at the account level was used to detect 85% of suspicious games in volleyball and 100% of suspicious games in tennis and table tennis. Showing the importance of collaborating closely with the sports betting industry to combat match fixing and threats to integrity.
- Europe had the highest number of suspicious games (667 vs 630 in 2022), followed by Asia (302 vs 240 in 2022) and South America (217 vs 225 in 2022).
- 1,295 suspicious games came from men’s sporting events, while 34 came from women’s sporting events
Data and reports from Sportradar Integrity Services last year contributed to a total of 147 sporting and criminal sanctions.
There were 39 cases across 10 sports in 23 countries, proving the company’s credentials as an established market leader in integrity services.
Sportradar supports more than 220 partners around the world, including sports organizations, state authorities, national platforms and law enforcement agencies.
Thus, the company is committed to keeping the sport free from threats such as match manipulation.
Company maintains continuous investment in technology
Andreas Krannich, Executive Vice President of Integrity, Rights Protection and Regulatory Services at Sportradar, said: “Continued investment in technology development is critical to detecting instances of match-fixing that would be difficult to find otherwise.
Combined with access to account-level data, industry-wide collaboration and human experts, we have a set of powerful tools to help prevent and detect risks to sports integrity.”
Further advances in the fight against match-fixing will be possible as AI models continue to learn. The company will continue to improve the experience to protect the sport from manipulation.”
Therefore, in addition to account-level data, with access to betting slips, UFDS analyzes 30 billion odds changes across 600 global betting operators in real time.
Advanced AI is also used to detect and flag suspicious matches to Sportradar’s global team of integrity analysts.
Supporting this effort is also the Sportradar Integrity Exchange (SIE), where more than 70 betting operators proactively submit suspicious betting information.
In this way, account-level betting data is used to detect and flag suspicious games.
