Interpol cracks down on football betting
Thursday January 24, 2008
KUALA LUMPUR: Another crackdown on Asian football betting syndicates which are said to be "controlling" European major league results is on the cards.
With the coming Euro 2008 competition to be held this summer, Interpol is seeking the cooperation of police forces from several Asian countries to carry out raids.
Interpol secretary-general Ronald Noble said in Singapore yesterday that Interpol was planning to launch a second operation to curb illegal football gambling in Asia following last year's success which netted US$680,000 (RM2.24mil) of suspected criminal proceeds.
He was quoted by AFP as saying that more countries would be involved in the second operation against football gambling, which was one of the most rampant organised crimes in the region.
The first operation, codenamed "Soga", was launched last October and involved 266 raids in Australia, China, Hong Kong, Macau, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam and resulted in more than 430 individuals arrested and 272 underground gambling dens shut down.
Speaking at the Global Conference on Asian Organised Crime hosted by the Singapore police force, Noble said the gambling dens that were closed handled an estimated US$680mil in illegal bets worldwide.
As an indication of how widespread football gambling is, European football's governing body UEFA had asked European police to investigate the results of at least 26 matches last year which were suspected to have been manipulated by Asian betting syndicates.
Noble said that while the amount of money involved in match-fixing was unknown, UEFA claimed that an overseas syndicate made US$5mil (RM16.5mil) on one championship match alone last July.
Malaysian police and the Malaysia Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) are working together to identify syndicates using the Internet to accept football bets.
Inspector-General of Police Tan Sri Musa Hassan said a task force has been set up and CID officers were currently monitoring suspected illegal bookmaking syndicates involved in accepting football bets via the Internet.
"Syndicates here operate using servers from other countries and that is why it is difficult for us to trace and nab the main culprits.
"That is why we have now asked our Asean counterparts as well as other police forces in the Asian region to provide us with information on syndicates linked with our country," he told The Star.
Musa said police here would exchange information with their counterparts worldwide.
About 200 participants from various law enforcement agencies of 32 countries, including Malaysia, attended the two-day conference.
Copyright (c) 1995-2008 Star Publications (Malaysia) Bhd (Co No 10894-D)
GoActive Football - A new football related website
Goactive Football are proud to announce the launch of a new football website goactivefootball which offers users everything relating to the professional and amateur game.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE / PRURGENT
The site offers the latest football related news in the UK, up to the minute league tables from all of the European Leagues including La Liga, Serie A and the Bundesliga, club information for every professional football club in England and Scotland, and statistics from all the major UK, European and International tournaments, from the English FA Cup to the World Cup.
The site also includes a betting/gambling and fantasy football informational section which lists latest injuries to players.
There is a free competition to enter called Hotshotso, which offers prizes for winners, and for those looking for humour, there are famous footballing quotes, latest videos from youtube and look-alikes!
An articles section contains articles on various football subjects, from improving your fitness to laws of the game, debating the red card rule to the pundits' corner.
As one of the main aims of the site is to act as a hub for the football community, there are also numerous other sections containing things like useful links and petitions, as well as regular online polls to participate in.
So whether it's the latest news or a footballing statistic you're looking for, you can find it all on this new extensive site which can be found at www.goactivefootball.co.uk
(c) PR Urgent News. All Rights Reserved
Card Player Media Launches Sports Odds Comparison Website
Powered by Easyodds, CardPlayerOdds.com is a comprehensive betting service that allows punters find the best odds and the best prices from leading online bookmakers, betting exchanges, and spread betting firms across Europe.
The service is absolutely free and provides betting markets on a wide variety of global sporting events including horseracing (with ante-post), football (including Asian handicaps), golf, tennis, cricket, motor racing, athletics, snooker, darts, American football, basketball, baseball, ice hockey, TV Bets, novelty bets and more.
Jeff Shulman, chief executive officer of Card Player Media, said, "We're thrilled to be able to offer this service, in conjunction with Easyodds. There's a big crossover between poker and sports betting, particularly in Europe where sports such as football are huge and placing bets on favourite sporting events is very much part of the everyday culture.
"Odds comparison allows smart punters to make an average of 20% more on their winnings and our new service is a perfect fit to the Card Player Media stable as it offers great advice in the form of previews, articles, and tips as well as helping punters find the very best value available -- something poker players know all about."
CardPlayerOdds.com also offers a comprehensive results service so punters can catch up on who won what and what won when, as well as sporting fixtures, tables, TV broadcast information, and over Ј500 in free bets when signing up to online bookmakers and exchanges.
CardPlayerOdds.com is every punters one-stop-shop for the best value, information, and analysis.
For further information please contact Brendan at 00 353 86 305 7469.
(c)2007 PR-USA.net
Cheating lurks in football's links to gambling
By Sue Mott
Last Updated: 1:31am GMT 04/12/2007
It can't happen here, you know. Police may be investigating allegations of match-fixing in the far-flung Eastern Bloc climes of Bulgaria, Georgia, Serbia, Croatia, Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia, but there is a general acceptance that if a Bulgarian, Georgian, Serbian, Croatian, Estonian, Lithuanian, Latvian or home-grown Briton (in the unlikely event of a foreign manager playing him) ran down the wing on English Premiership business, he would do so in good faith.
Humanity, in footballer form, undergoes some kind of moral car wash when it approaches these shores, we fondly think. It is scrubbed of sin and waxed to a virtuous shine. The Brits don't go in for this corruption lark. They are not seduced by gangster gambling syndicates offering fortunes, or threatening dire fates, to influence the outcome of matches. It can happen there, where rewards are limited and lifestyles insecure, but not here where a footballer would be risking a king's ransom to go over to the dark side.
It is a pretty convincing argument until you remember that we thought the Eastern Bloc were on drugs and Brits weren't, until it was proved that we were: Linford Christie, David Millar, Dwain Chambers, Carl Myerscough, to name but a few.
According to Uefa president Michel Platini: "It's a big problem for us. We have known that for a long time and it could become very bad for football, and for all sport, in the future." He did not say a "big problem for us, excluding Britain" and that is because the frailties of human nature do not cease at the white cliffs of Dover. Gambling among football people in this country, from the various glimpses we have been given, is massive. Sir Alex Ferguson has his horses, Harry Redknapp has his gambling column in The Sun, Wayne Rooney ran up alleged 700,000 gbp gambling debts with a bookmaker.
Peter Kay, of the Sporting Chance Charity, has called gambling "the largest addiction in football, accepted and tolerated as a form of relaxation for players, condoned by clubs and managers". Obviously it is condoned. Four Premiership clubs don't just condone gambling, they are party to its promotion through shirt advertising. Aston Villa - 32Red, Middlesbrough - 888.com, Tottenham - Mansion, and Blackburn - Bet24, can scarcely complain their players are gambling when betting companies are invited into the boardroom.
But it is still fine because we are not recovering communists and, anyway, the Premier League players are paid far too much money to be prey to gangsters offering brown envelopes. But Peter Kay did not call gambling a pastime, he called it an "addiction". In some cases, an addiction is uncontrollable. It is just as possible for an English Premier League player to go bust as a pittance-earning Lithuanian. It just depends on the amount of the stake.
Betting shops in downtown Vilnius may handle miniscule bets compared with their London counterparts, but the effect can be exactly the same. Bet a few litas or 100,000 gbp, it is not the odds but the stake that counts. Lose and lose again, a pretty common fate in the gambling world, and you are on the financial rack. Whoever you are, whatever you drive, wherever you live. At that point a footballer can become distressed and vulnerable to suggestion.
Far better to comply with a little tweak of fate than have your entire world ripped apart and shipped away. Hansie Cronje twisted a game of his beloved cricket despite being captain of South Africa. If he could, anyone could under sufficient duress. You might think that after these warnings from Uefa, a court case involving alleged race fixing presently going through British courts and the sheer number of footballers seemingly caught up in a business we once called a vice, that the Government and the sport would be united in severing the ties between gambling and football.
They are not. "We are not complacent but there is no evidence of it happening here," a spokesman for the Department of Culture, Media and Sport said. The Gambling Commission obliges betting companies and governing bodies to share information in the light of suspicious betting activity. Any sportsman found guilty of cheating by match-fixing faces a possible sentence of two years in jail.
But as for footballers being warned against close association with bookmakers, some of the most lavishly hospitable and generous business people on the planet: they are not. It would be absurd to banish your own sponsor. As a result, the association is free, regular and potentially dangerous.
Match-fixing is death to genuine competition. It is a hideous, tainting scar on the bright face that sport ought to present to the world. Platini has noted that the "criminal phenomena" is an increasing problem in the world's global economy, the Premier League has been warned that gambling is an "addiction", the tide of allegations is lapping at our shores but we seem blithely unable to see the growing bond between football and gambling as potentially unhealthy.
To be strictly fair, football among other governing bodies is looking at ways of establishing an investigative and compliance unit across a number of sports. The irony is that they want the betting companies to contribute to its existence. "On the grounds that the polluter pays," a spokesman for the Premier League said. Maybe it would be better to just stem the pollution.
Perhaps those people skipping about in the meadow thinking that nothing can happen here are a combination of patriotic and naive.
Perhaps they forget that a sportsman can never be too big to fall, witness Paolo Rossi, the Italian striker banned for two years in 1980 for involvement in a betting syndicate. Perhaps they are not obsessive gamblers themselves and cannot conceive the combination of greed and desperation that would precipitate the criminal act.
"Well," the man from the DCMS admitted, "I had a dream last night that Ricky Hatton knocked out 'Pretty Boy' Mayweather in the first round. So I had 2 gbp on it." If he had said 200,000 gbp, he might be closer to understanding the dangers.
(c) Copyright of Telegraph Media Group Limited 2007
Ministers heed FA pleas and target foreign betting sites
Matt Scott
Tuesday October 30, 2007
The Guardian
Ministers are to write to Gibraltar's Gambling Regulation Authority amid concerns that its light-touch regulatory regime could provide a back door for corruption in British sport. The move comes after Lord Faulkner demanded action from the Department of Culture, Media and Sport against overseas bookmakers who refuse to implement information-exchange agreements with sporting bodies. These memoranda of understanding are required in the UK under Gambling Commission regulations but some overseas operators have rejected demands to apply them.
"There is no doubt that our rules preventing betting cheats are some of the toughest in the world," said a DCMS spokesman. "We believe it is right that sports bodies and bookmakers should share information."
Faulkner, who chaired an all-party betting and gaming group, made his move after the Football Association asked for his help in its investigations into breaches of its betting rules. The FA's inquiry looked at allegations made last November by a former employee of Victor Chandler International [VCI] who claimed that four Premier League managers had placed significant bets on English matches.
Faulkner raised his concerns with VCI about the apparent breach of FA rule E8, which forbids participants from gambling on competitions in which they are involved. The peer attended a meeting on September 10 involving VCI's chief executive, Michael Carlton, and the FA's director of governance, Jonathan Hall, when Hall asked the bookmaker to sign an information-exchange agreement.
"Football managers are regulated by the FA," said a spokesman for the bookmaker. "It is their job to ensure they abide by FA rules. As far as our business is concerned, we will not tolerate corrupt betting on any sport, football included. We are a highly reputable, well regulated business operating to the highest standards and would do nothing that creates long-term damage to our company or the industry as a whole.
"At that meeting, Mr Carlton explained that our business relies on the company respecting the confidentiality of its clients and indeed they are part of the terms and conditions of VCI. Mr Carlton explained that VCI believe the issues raised should be looked at on an industry-wide basis, not as an agreement with one bookmaker prompted by false allegations based on fabricated evidence."
There is an industry-wide requirement but it is effective only for companies based in the UK. If VCI were located here it would be obliged to volunteer information to the FA under condition 15 of the licence granted by the Gambling Commission. That states: "Licensees who accept bets, or facilitate the making of bets between others ... must also provide the relevant sport governing body with any information the licensee suspects may relate to a breach of a rule applied by the sport governing body."
VCI insisted that it would consider any FA proposal provided it "applies to the industry as a whole" but the FA suspects the company is not interested in helping. Requests to see VCI's integrity team in action in the two months since the meeting have come to naught. Faulkner shares the FA's suspicions. "It is very clear [VCI] has no intention of cooperating unless it is made to do anything to encourage its clients to give up their right to privacy."
There is a "white" list of approved operators from outside the European Economic Area who are permitted to advertise in the UK after proving their integrity credentials to the government. Bookmakers based in jurisdictions such as Netherlands Antilles are not allowed to advertise in the UK after failing to convince government of their regulatory effectiveness.
Faulkner would like to see the advertising ban extended to uncooperative bookmakers in Gibraltar but DCMS considers this unworkable under European law, placing its faith instead in the diplomatic approach.
Guardian Unlimited (c) Guardian News and Media Limited 2007
Nothing scares coaches more than gambling
college football
By JOHN HELSLEY
The Oklahoman
Thursday, October 25, 2007
Texas coach Mack Brown so fears the evils of gambling, he pleads with his players to keep Longhorns' injuries secret -- even from mom and dad.
Big brother is watching, too, as the Big 12 Conference maintains a working relationship with a Las Vegas firm that monitors betting trends.
"We tell our players," Brown said, 'If you're going to talk to even your parents, don't talk about injuries. Be really, really careful, because it puts you in a tough spot, because it looks like for some reason you might be putting information out.' "
The Longhorns coach isn't so much concerned about the parents racing to lay money down with bookies. His point is you never know who's listening.
"If they tell somebody at the drug store, the grocery store, then it just grows," Brown said.
"Gambling scares you to death. It's another one of those things that is not an issue, until you have it."
A 2003 report issued by the NCAA suggested it's a very real issue, with student-athletes involved in widespread gambling of some sort.
The report spurred the Big 12 to raise its awareness on gambling and its potential influence on games, leading to the hiring of Las Vegas Sports Consultants Inc., a group that also works with the NCAA, NFL, NBA and NHL.
The Big 12's alliance with LVSC, in its third year, is one phase of the league's gambling program that also includes background reviews that include court document research, as well as education of athletes and officials.
The connection with LVSC delivers an insider's view of betting lines and trends and how they might relate to Big 12 schools in football and men's basketball, the college sports where lines are set.
"They inform us if there's any kind of concern about the way the lines move or on money that comes in on the game at the last minute, stuff like that," Beebe said.
"So far, knock on wood, we haven't had any issues. But we decided that's a worthwhile effort."
Beebe was concerned last month when it was revealed that Texas A&M coach Dennis Franchione was e-mailing certain donors with "insider" updates that included, among other items of interest, injury information, although no links to gambling have surfaced.
"It's unfortunate, because I think he's figured out and others, that it was not the thing to do," Beebe said. "We don't want that kind of information being shared, obviously."
Elsewhere, conferences and schools haven't been so fortunate.
Just last March, the FBI alleged it had uncovered a conspiracy between a gambler and a football player at Toledo to influence the outcomes of games.
Some cases have gone further.
The NBA suffered a public relations hit when former referee Tim Donaghy pleaded guilty to felony charges of gambling and wire fraud last August. The NHL, too, took a hit when former Phoenix Coyotes assistant coach Rick Tocchet was accused of financing a nationwide gambling ring and pleaded guilty to gambling-related charges last year.
In 2001, Florida basketball player Teddy Dupay was declared ineligible for his senior season after admitting to violating team rules about betting on sports.
Northwestern has been stung twice by noted scandals. In 2001, former football player Brain Ballarini pled guilty to gambling charges and admitted to running betting operations at Northwestern and Colorado. In a related matter, two Northwestern basketball players admitted they tried to fix games. In 1994, a Northwestern football player was suspended for gambling, but denied he fumbled intentionally at the goal line in a game against Iowa.
In 1996, then-Boston College football coach Dan Henning heard after a 45-17 loss to Syracuse that some of his players may have bet against their own team. Eventually, 13 BC players were suspended and six were banned.
These and similar situations, where unsavory characters coerce college athletes to affect a game's outcome, concern coaches most.
"It's real scary to me," said Oklahoma coach Bob Stoops. "You've got to protect the game ... It's just educating them on just what a horrible place and position to put yourself in, the ramifications of it and just how easy it can happen."
(c) 2007 The E.W. Scripps Co.
College Football Upsets - Remarkable Facts!
WEBWIRE - Sunday, October 07, 2007
Sports betting expert RJ Bell, the only sports bettor on Forbes' recent list of Gambling Gurus, provides the true numbers behind the recent trend of big college football upsets.
Las Vegas, Nevada (October 7, 2007) - College football is abuzz with talk of upsets, but few in the mainstream media have the correct information concerning the significance of these upsets.
(All data from 1980 onward)
* Stanford's win over USC is the biggest upset ever - USC was favored by 40 points.
* The second biggest upset also happened this season: Syracuse +37.5 over Louisville.
* The third biggest upset was UTEP +36 over BYU in 1985
* Before this season, the last upset of +30 or more happened way back in 2000 (C. Michigan +34 over W. Michigan)
* Before this season, there had been only 9 upsets out of the 703 games with an underdog of +30 or more
* There was no Las Vegas line on Appalachian State's win over Michigan, but the outlaw bookmakers had Michigan favored by 28 points.
MEDIA NOTE: Print, radio, TV, and Internet media should feel free to quote any information above.
RJ Bell of Pregame.com is available by email for media appearances and any follow-up questions at: rjbell@pregame.com
Special thanks to Marc Lawrence's Playbook for assistance with this research.
RJ Bell, president of Pregame.com, has been featured on CBS News with Katie Couric, ABC News with Charles Gibson, Nightline, Sportscenter, Outside the Lines (ESPN), First Take (ESPN2), ESPN.com, ESPN National Radio, AOL.com, CNN.com – and in Wall Street Journal, Associated Press, LA Times, Newsweek.com, Maxim, and Forbes.
WebWire (c) 1995 - 2007
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