Hong Kong (AsiaNews/Agencies) - As teams battle for football glory at the World Cup in Brazil, the biggest winners from the tournament may be illegal bookmakers in Asia. Demand for bets from Asian sports enthusiasts illustrates how the World Cup is also a huge bonanza for betting companies while focusing attention on the surge in illegal wagering in East Asia, where there are few legal options to accommodate the lucrative market."It is the biggest single gambling event of the decade and each World Cup gets bigger," said Warwick Bartlett, CEO of Global Betting & Gaming Consultants, based on the Isle of Man. However, "the propensity to gamble in Asia is stronger than anywhere else on the planet, yet there are few legalized gambling opportunities."
Government monopoly operators offer legal sports betting in a handful of Asian jurisdictions, including mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore, South Korea, Japan and Taiwan. The Philippines' Cagayan province is home to 68 online gambling companies. It's banned outright in many other countries, including India, Indonesia and Thailand. But thousands more illegal online bookmaking outfits, which don't pay tax, are thriving because they offer better prices, odds, wider variety of bet types and credit.
Asia accounts for just over half of the illegal bets placed worldwide, according to a recent report by a sports monitoring group. The Hong Kong Jockey Club, the world's second biggest betting operator, reported that betting turnover during the 2010 World Cup fell 1.6 percent compared with the 2006 event, which it blamed on growing use of illegal bookies. In May, Singapore police arrested 18 people suspected to be involved in an illegal football betting ring. They seized 1.4 million Singapore dollars (.1 million) in cash and uncovered records that showed the suspects received S million (.3 million) in illegal bets in the prior two weeks.
Hong Kong police raided several gambling operations at the start of the tournament, including a cross-border operation with counterparts in mainland China to break up what they said was the city's biggest ever gambling syndicate, arresting 29 people and seizing slips for about 0 million in bets on football and horse racing.
In Thailand, where a business group estimates Thais will spend 43 billion baht (.3 billion) on illegal gambling during the World Cup, police have set up a gambling "suppression center" and arrested dozens of gamblers and bookmakers, according to a local news report. The busts represent a fraction of the total. Football match fixing has emerged as a major concern after the European Union's police agency said last year that a review found nearly 700 suspicious matches around the world as well as evidence that a Singapore-based crime syndicate was involved in some of the rigging. A phenomenon that previously has not spared even China.