That’s a lot of impressive acronyms, but what do groups like these actually do? And are they effective?
Watching the Detectives
For as long as legal sports gambling platforms have existed, people have tried to exploit them. That necessitates the presence of integrity agencies, which have existed in some form for decades.
These agencies, Bjorn says, grew into their modern form in the early-to-mid 2000s in large part as a response to widespread match-fixing scandals in professional tennis. These incidents led to the 2008 formation of the Tennis Integrity Unit, which Bjorn says was one of the first such groups to lean heavily on data-driven analysis to proactively spot malfeasance. By tracking live betting patterns across various sportsbooks and networks, the integrity agency could ostensibly spot suspicious bets that might signal collusion, match-fixing, or some similar attempt to scam the system.
Does some random second-round match at a small tournament suddenly draw 10 times the betting volume of similar matches, for instance? That might smell fishy to these agents, who could then coordinate with governing bodies to investigate.
More of these entities soon followed, including those that covered a multitude of sports.
“They saw niches to go to other leagues, sporting events or [government] regulators to say hey, we can monitor this,” Bjorn says. “We can start using big data.”
Integrity monitors are now ubiquitous in the regulated sports gambling market. IC360 (formerly US Integrity) is the most notable within the US, while the International Betting Integrity Association is a primary player globally as well as in part of the US. Bjorn’s company, Plannatech, works with these and other entities, using its full stack risk management platform to help analyze incoming bets in real time to detect anomalies.
These agencies obtain live betting data from betting platforms around the world and use it to monitor for potential signs of misbehavior—say, large bets coming in for an underdog within an hour of the game starting—and sending out alerts to sports leagues, federations, and casinos about the suspicious patterns.
“They actually have a dashboard that you can see where the bet flows are on certain sports,” Bjorn says. “They review stuff, partner with the leagues, monitor referees, umpires.”
In some cases, such patterns may only be discovered after the fact. In 2024, it was revealed that former NBA player Jontay Porter was involved in a betting scandal, and it was a suspicious pattern of betting and behavior that led to the detection of fraud. Porter claimed an injury or illness and pulled himself out of two games early in the first quarter. His conspirators were betting the “under” on how many points or rebounds he’d rack up, and Porter would guarantee those bets would hit by removing himself from the game.
The vast majority of the alerts flagged by integrity teams ultimately reveal no concerns. The 2 or 3 percent that do, though, can be valuable for weeding out potential scams.
The Olympics involve many of the same challenges for integrity agencies. The IOC partners with the IBIA for integrity monitoring, and it says it brings in a Joint Integrity Unit that includes Interpol, UNODC, and other worldwide regulatory authorities for each Games. The IOC also has a number of strict rules, including that no person accredited for the Games is allowed to place any bet on any Olympic event. The Committee also utilizes several forms of pre-event risk modeling where it tracks many of the Olympic sports in non-Olympic and qualifying settings to widen the baseline of betting and outcome trends.
Source: www.wired.com
