The bookmaker counts...
Some time ago, one of the leading Russian bookmakers found itself at the center of a major scandal. All because several of its cashiers placed bets on the outcome of a football match. True, not before, but after the game, thereby lightening the establishment's cash register by a tidy sum. The court assessed such ingenuity at five years' imprisonment. Cases of "abuse of official position" are not uncommon in the bookmaking environment, although as a rule they do not go to court.
A bookmaker can "cheat" a player in various ways. The most primitive is to suddenly vanish with all the money. This, of course, is not about reputable firms that value their reputation, but about fly-by-night operations for whom deception is the main source of income. Among the latter are many "black" bookmakers who work in parallel with official ones, luring clients with higher odds. Often bookies also play with the state. The bet is called "tax evasion". In the vast majority of cases, the guilty manage to avoid responsibility.
Of course, players also cheat. Most often with the help of counterfeit cards that the office issues for placed bets. According to some data, every twentieth card is fake. And bookies lose tens of thousands of dollars annually on this.
Ace players who have made sports prediction their profession also add headaches to bookmakers. Among them are many former and current athletes who know all the ins and outs of the trade. In order not to go broke, the office must correctly calculate the odds for the outcome of an event. If the odds are unjustifiably high, a professional player can "fleece" the bookmaker in a matter of hours, or even minutes. As a result, bookies simply have nothing to pay out winnings, and they return the players' bets. Such stories are known in abundance. However, here it is more appropriate to talk not about fraud, but about accurate calculation. A pro rarely tries to ruin the office; for him the main thing is money. Nevertheless, it was precisely incompetently set odds, along with counterfeit cards, that became the main reason for the ruin of dozens of bookmakers at the dawn of the betting business in the early 90s.
Internet "rip-offs"
Virtual bookmaking has become a real godsend for modern Ostap Benders. If only because accepting bets on the Internet is not accounted for anywhere and does not require a special license, and "black" bookmakers feel especially good here. The Internet is flooded with advertisements for bookmaker sites with the "most favorable bonuses and odds". Having transferred money to the account of such an office, you are unlikely to wait for it to pay out your winnings. The people who open these sites are often in offshore zones, and it is impossible to track them down.
In the United States, where sports betting is prohibited in most states, a wave of lawsuits against owners of illegal online totalizators swept through several years ago. The organizers of such enterprises found a convenient way to circumvent American laws - they registered their sites in countries where such gambling is allowed: Panama, Curaçao, the Dominican Republic, Antigua, Costa Rica.
Internet bookmakers, primarily foreign ones, themselves often suffer from dishonest players. Our compatriots have become famous here too for their ability to circumvent laws. Someone invented a cunning method of withdrawing money from stolen credit cards by placing simultaneous bets in different Internet offices. For a time, Western bookmakers and online casinos even stopped accepting bets from citizens of Russia and the CIS.
Respectable Western bookmakers are also afraid of Russian hackers, whose ingenuity has long crossed the borders of their homeland. For example, several Russians managed to clean out the British online office Canbet Sport Bookmakers and other similar firms to the tune of $3 million. Internet fraudsters blocked bookmakers' servers by sending a huge number of requests to them, as a result of which they suffered enormous losses, and demanded money from bookmakers to stop the attacks. The case was investigated by the British National High-Tech Crime Unit. English police turned to their Russian colleagues for help. Nine hackers, residents of different cities of the country, were arrested. The investigation of their criminal case recently ended at the Investigative Committee under the Russian Interior Ministry. The extortionists face up to 15 years in prison.
Professional Interest
Rip-offs are both an exciting and profitable game. Drawn into it are not only bookmakers and passionate fans, but also referees, athletes, and officials at all levels.
Three years ago, Ferrari driver Michael Schumacher found himself at the center of a major scandal. At the Formula 1 World Championship stage - the Austrian Grand Prix - a few meters before the finish, the famous racer overtook his teammate, Brazilian Rubens Barrichello, who had received the corresponding order from the Ferrari pits. This incident caused a storm of indignant reactions from fans. Several bookmakers filed a lawsuit against Schumacher and his team, accusing the drivers of fraud. The bookmakers can be understood: if Barrichello had won, they would have received much greater profit than after the victory of favorite Schumacher. The International Automobile Federation also investigated the actions of the Ferrari drivers.
Before the Sydney Olympics, the International Amateur Boxing Association promised to double the fees for referees who reported attempts to bribe them. And around the ring, television cameras were installed that carefully monitored the work of all officials.
In the USA, where revenues from this sport run into hundreds of millions of dollars, the past decades have been marked by a series of scandals. It turned out, for example, that the famous boxer Ray Mercer offered Jesse Ferguson $100,000 during a fight to throw the bout. The case was made public, and Mercer was disqualified. The press, citing FBI data, reported that such famous boxers as George Foreman and Iron Barkley also did not disdain fixed fights. Officials of the IBF boxing association got burned by their desire to promote their fighters.
Extreme sports are not free from cheating either, including "no-holds-barred fights" that are very popular abroad, though no high-profile cases have occurred yet.
Jockey, don't rush...
It is believed that the largest bets here are placed at the racetrack. Fifteen to twenty years ago, it was one of the most crime-ridden zones, with gun battles among underground bookmakers. Wealthy people were hooked on horses like on drugs. They paid with cars, apartments, dachas, gradually losing their fortunes.
There are plenty of ways to influence the outcome of a race or heat — for example, replacing a strong horse with a weak one before the start, injecting the animal with a stimulant, or bribing the jockey. An experienced rider is believed to have many tricks and ploys with which he can always achieve the desired result. Moreover, in such a way that neither his fellow riders in the race, nor the public, nor even television cameras will detect the trick. The riders themselves, jockeys and trainers are forbidden to play the totalizator, but circumventing this prohibition is easy. Even the bet itself can be fraudulent in essence. At the racetrack, there is always the risk of encountering "planted" provocateurs, whose task is to make a demonstratively large bet on a deliberately weak horse. Looking at "knowledgeable people," others also start betting on the outsider — the herd effect kicks in. As a result, the horse, as expected, comes in last. And the one who, under cover of the commotion, bet on the favorite, rubs his hands: after all, there were few bets on the strong horse, and the winnings were substantial.
Abroad, especially in Great Britain, where horse racing and dog racing are wildly popular, the press keeps reporting on the exposure of yet another racetrack swindler. One craftsman, for instance, used a laser-beam device to knock horses off stride; another got the hang of knocking jockeys out of the saddle with a powerful ultrasonic discharge. And a certain veterinarian created a doping drug that could not be detected even under the most meticulous testing, and only on his deathbed did he reveal the secret of his potion.
In Ireland, a gang working at dog races was recently exposed. The scheme was elementary simple; all that was required was speed and coordination. A man approached the totalizator window a few minutes before the end of the race, filled out a form, leaving the "dog" and "track number" fields blank. The cashier pointed out the oversight to the "forgetful" client and returned the form. At that moment the race ended, and the fraudster instantly received from an accomplice inside the stadium an SMS with the number of the winning dog. The number was immediately written into the form and handed to the cashier. Before the criminals were tracked down, they managed to enrich themselves by several thousand euros
"Match-Fixing" — A Common Woe
Several years ago, before one of the matches of the Russian football championship, cashiers of the well-known bookmaker office "Fon" could not believe their eyes: almost at all of its windows, maximum bets were simultaneously placed on the victory of an obvious underdog. Moreover, the bets were made just before the start of the game, so that the office would not have time to lower the odds. It is not hard to guess what happened next: the underdog won, and the office suffered huge losses paying out winnings. The match, of course, was fixed.
For legal bookmakers, match-fixing is a considerable headache. "There are especially many fixed games in the second divisions of football championships," the bookies claim. "We have special people who collect information about such matches."
However, there is no rule without exceptions. There are cases when totalizator owners collude with players or referees. Moreover, foreign referees are far from always models of integrity. Last winter, a major scandal erupted in Germany: it turned out that football referee Robert Hoyzer, before matches he officiated, bet through intermediaries at a bookmaker office on the weak team, and then with biased officiating led it to victory. The Hoyzer case was taken up by the leadership of the German Football Association and the prosecutor's office. The referee, in particular, confessed that for the "needed" results he received a bribe of €70,000 from bookmakers. Footballer Steffen Karl of the club "Chemnitz" was arrested — in a match against "Paderborn" he deliberately broke the rules in his own penalty area to give Hoyzer the opportunity to award a penalty. It is assumed that a whole criminal network operated in German football, which included not only referees and players but also high-ranking sports officials.
Sometimes direct tampering with results is also used. A perfectly fantastic incident occurred last summer in Georgia, where in an Intertoto Cup football match, local team "Dila" hosted Bulgarian "Marek". After the game, on internet sites, most agencies, sports publications and bookmaker offices reported the result: a 3:3 draw, and even listed the scorers of the goals. Western bookmakers, as expected, began paying out winnings. And the next day they clutched their heads: it turned out that in reality the match ended with a 2:0 victory for the visitors. This case was investigated by the Georgian police. It is said that everything happened because in Georgia the clocks were moved the night before the game, and also because the meeting actually started two hours later than scheduled. In all this confusion, unknown fraudsters could have earned about $12 million.