Criminals spend more time avoiding detection by bookmakers than fixing matches

Declan Hill, a journalist and academic who specialises on the topic of match fixing, has warned the gambling industry that it is playing a cat and mouse game while trying to detect match-fixing activity, and the mouse has the edge.

Speaking to this month’s Betting Business magazine ahead of his appearance at the Malta iGaming Seminar in November, Hill said that the fixers spend more time trying to find ways of avoiding detection by the gambling industry than fixing the actual results themselves.

“There’s some really intelligent, sophisticated ways of avoiding detecting,” he commented. “I’m not saying they are geniuses, but they are at least as intelligent as the people looking for their activity. That’s why I think that it’s important for the industry to drop their ego and recognise you are in a competition with them.

“One of the first things to do is for people to drop their ego and push up their intelligence gathering. There tends to be a fair amount of ego in a male dominated industry. I see the line coming from very intelligent people that they don’t see many fixes in the market. Of course you don’t see them – it’s because the fixers don’t want to get caught. They spend an inordinate amount of time working out how to evade detection by intelligent people.”

Hill said he really wants sport to really take the bull by the horns and prosecute a senior official on match fixing charges rather than the ‘fall guys’ who have taken most of the heat so far, such as the German referee Robert Hoyzer. He thinks that by taking this to the top, then a clear message is sent out and would deter others from falling into the match fixing trap.

“I think the future of modern sport is really in peril,” he said. “If I had a message for the sporting authorities it would be: work with the regulated gaming industry, stop messing around and put a league official on trial and let’s get cracking.”