How online sportsbooks can detect World Cup match fixing

The World Cup is a lot of things to a lot of people: religion, celebration of sport and a festival of football. It can bring a lot of joy to people and in other cases a lot of anguish as well. The one aspect of the World Cup nobody likes to talk about is match fixing. For any game that involves referees this will always be an issue when it comes to judgement, which has it’s price. As long as people will bet on the world cup then match fixing will always be an issue. If you are going to bet on the World Cup, at least do it with a bonus and you can find free bets at bettingbonusestoday.com. Going into the 2014 World Cup in Brazil the issue has found it’s way into the discussion thanks to tips that a Nigera-Scotland friendly match could feature match fixing. The Nigerian players looked like they would be given a million for any own goal and they couldn’t disguise their efforts with the worst footage of all coming from the goalkeeper who is clearly shown to throw the ball in his own net. Leading into the World Cup, many agencies are working together to try to combat match fixing which is always suspected during any World Cup but nobody wants to see it. The majority of betting on the World Cup will probably be done on the streets and not with any official land based bookmaker or a licensed online sportsbook. The more the industry is regulated, the more it will be able to detect unusual betting patterns which can be used to detect suspected match fixing. According to Ralf Mutschke, Fifa's head of security, the 2 types of bets that appear to be in question for match fixing are the Asian handicap and the over/under for goals in a game. Other types of games that are under risk of match fixing and will be closely monitored are last round of the group matches involving teams that are already eliminated and warm up games. Supposedly the group involving England is believed to be lower risk compared to other groups. So how could an online sportsbook or betting exchange possibly detect match fixing? Well it isn’t a completely fool proof system but in the past 5 to 10 years many sportsbooks do detect irregular betting on matches of all sports and this is a signal something is up. For example large wagers placed on games that usually don’t get a lot of betting activity or simply many times the bet size placed heavily on one bet that typically involves a larger payout. When irregular betting does happen, the sportsbooks are able to notify the specific sports federation and often this has lead to charges against players and has also been able to take down criminal betting networks that engage in match fixing. During the world cup, online sportsbooks will only be able to go so far as those who have engaged in match fixing will probably not want to risk money or being detected by betting online but rather keep it all underground where it can be controlled. That said it is possible for referees and players to leak out this information and this is where things can get out of hand and people can get caught. Imagine if you had the inside knowledge that a referee was going to award a red card which could make a game high scoring, would you pass on this info to a friend who could place a bet, return a good sum of money and split it? While most people want to pretend match fixing doesn’t happen, it does and there will be many agencies working together to try to keep the damage done to a minimum. For everyone else that wants to pretend this is a non issue, let’s just hope we can all enjoy the games without any controversies at all and may the best team win.