World Cup highlights Asia’s illegal betting boom

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HONG KONG (AP) — As teams battle for football glory at
the World Cup in Brazil, the biggest winners from the tournament may be
illegal bookmakers in Asia.
Since kickoff, Chinese officer worker
Chen has already wagered 2,000-3,000 yuan ($320-$480) through black
market online bookies and plans to gamble more on big upcoming games.
Chen,
who started betting on sports that also include NBA games four years
ago, said that during the previous World Cup in South Africa he bet
115,000 yuan ($18,500) in a single day on three different games — a huge
sum for the average Chinese — and lost about half of it.
"My
friend helped me with betting on games through the Internet," said Chen.
"I’ll call my friend and transfer money to him and he would help me to
deal with the rest."
Chen, who lives in the southern city of
Shenzhen, next to Hong Kong, would only give his surname because he
didn’t want to get in trouble with authorities for betting illegally.
Demand
for bets from Asian sports enthusiasts illustrates how the World Cup is
also a huge bonanza for betting companies while focusing attention on
the surge in illegal wagering in East Asia, where there are few legal
options to accommodate the lucrative market.
"It is the biggest
single gambling event of the decade and each World Cup gets bigger,"
said Warwick Bartlett, CEO of Global Betting & Gaming Consultants,
based on the Isle of Man. However, "the propensity to gamble in Asia is
stronger than anywhere else on the planet, yet there are few legalized
gambling opportunities."
Government monopoly operators offer legal
sports betting in a handful of Asian jurisdictions, including mainland
China, Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore, South Korea, Japan and Taiwan. The
Philippines’ Cagayan province is home to 68 online gambling companies.
It’s banned outright in many other countries, including India, Indonesia
and Thailand. But thousands more illegal online bookmaking outfits,
which don’t pay tax, are thriving because they offer better prices,
odds, wider variety of bet types and credit. Asia accounts for just over
half of the illegal bets placed worldwide, according to a recent report
by a sports monitoring group.
The Hong Kong Jockey Club, the
world’s second biggest betting operator, reported that betting turnover
during the 2010 World Cup fell 1.6 percent compared with the 2006 event,
which it blamed on growing use of illegal bookies.
Police forces
in Asia are cracking down, swooping on a number of gambling rings in
recent weeks. In May, Singapore police arrested 18 people suspected to
be involved in an illegal football betting ring. They seized 1.4 million
Singapore dollars ($1.1 million) in cash and uncovered records that
showed the suspects received S$8 million ($6.3 million) in illegal bets
in the prior two weeks.
Hong Kong police raided several gambling
operations at the start of the tournament, including a cross-border
operation with counterparts in mainland China to break up what they said
was the city’s biggest ever gambling syndicate, arresting 29 people and
seizing slips for about $100 million in bets on football and horse
racing. Even Hong Kong’s prisons are tightening up prevention measures
during the tournament by stepping up surprise inspections and cutting
out any information on odds from newspapers and magazines given to
prisoners.
In Thailand, where a business group estimates Thais
will spend 43 billion baht ($1.3 billion) on illegal gambling during the
World Cup, police have set up a gambling "suppression center" and
arrested dozens of gamblers and bookmakers, according to a local news
report.
The busts represent a fraction of the total. Wagers made
outside licensed, regulated channels account for 80 percent of the 200
billion to 500 billion euros ($271 billion to $678 billion) bet globally
on sports per year, according to a report released in May by the
Qatar-based International Center for Sport Security.
It estimated that black market wagering is used to launder more than $140 billion in dirty money every
year.
"Organized
crime has moved into football because they have seen that this is a
much easier way to make money than the traditional ways of racketeering,
prostitution, drugs," said Patrick Jay, director of trading at the Hong
Kong Jockey Club. "They do this either by means of bookmaking … or
they do it through the means of actually arranging results of football
matches, what’s known as fixing football matches."
Football match
fixing has emerged as a major concern after the European Union’s police
agency said last year that a review found nearly 700 suspicious matches
around the world as well as evidence that a Singapore-based crime
syndicate was involved in some of the rigging. Three books have also
been recently released on the subject, including one by Wilson Raj
Perumal, a Singaporean with ties to Asian and Eastern European gambling
syndicates who was jailed in Finland for match-fixing.
However,
Jay said chances are slim of World Cup game being fixed because fixers
target games with low media and fan interest involving poorly paid
players. He added that if fixers do try to target a game during the
tournament, it would be one in which the result is not very important to
either side.
"There’s no doubt the match fixers will look at
those games. However, FIFA, EUFA and Interpol are all over this now.
FIFA and Interpol are in the dressing rooms, they’re in the stadiums,
their security people are in the hotels, they’re liaising with
bookmakers, sports governing bodies, sponsors, security people," he
said.
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Associated Press researcher Fu Ting in Shanghai contributed to this report.

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