By Andrew Warshaw
November 21 – The Asian Football Confederation, part of whose territory is home to the illegal betting rings organising the global match-fixing epidemic, has taken on fraud detection experts Sportradar in the fight against the criminal gangs responsible.
The Swiss-based company monitors around 350 of the world’s biggest bookmakers, including those offshore, detecting and identifying potential fixed matches for a raft of clients, including UEFA, CONCACAF, the Bundesliga and English and Scottish football.
The AFC has now been added to that list in a partnership that will see Sportsradar, who say they process 432 million odds movements per day, monitoring matches at regional tournaments including the 2015 Asian Cup, the AFC Champions League and the AFC Cup.
The last of those was targeted by fixers earlier this year with a Singapore Court jailing Lebanese referee Ali Sabbagh for six months and his assistants Ali Eid and Abdallah Taleb for three months after they were found guilty of accepting sexual favours to rig a game.
“AFC’s partnership with Sportradar is the latest step taken to counter the threat that match-fixing poses to football in Asia,” AFC general secretary Alex Soosay (pictured) said in a statement. “We look forward to utilising Sportradar’s proven expertise in this field and developing an effective working partnership.”
Sportsradar say they analyse over 53,000 matches each year and were instrumental in unearthing a math-fixing scandal in Australia in October which led to four players and one official being banned worldwide by FIFA.
Earlier this year, following a wide-ranging investigation, the European police agency Europol revealed startling occurrences of match-fixing with 680 games globally deemed suspicious, 380 of which were in Europe.
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