International gambling sites are collecting play-by-play data on suburban basketball and football games around Australia, raising the spectre of match-fixing.Sportradar, a company that monitors match-fixing for FIFA, is using a low-profile subsidiary to collect data from amateur sporting competitions on behalf of offshore live-betting sites.
This subsidiary, Real Time Sportscasts, targets students through university job boards, then sends them to amateur, semi-professional and low-level sports to collect the live data.The scouts feed data into a call centre, where it is distributed to international gambling websites.
There is concern that the use of the data by those international gambling organisations may lead others to encourage match fixing on local Australian games.
In response to the revelations, Senator Nick Xenophon will push for a tightening of gambling laws.
"The potential for corrupting those sporting codes, the potential for compromising players and officials is just too great," Senator Xenophon says.
"We can't let our amateur sporting codes, our amateur games, be infected with gambling in this way."
"I mean, it seems that these people have no shame. It wouldn't surprise me if they decide to target an under-10 footy team somewhere in the country sooner rather than later, because right now, there are no checks, no controls, on the way these jokers operate."
Kate Tominac, a coach in the ACT Premier League Women's competition, another league that has attracted the interest of data scouts and the international betting market, says the scouts have dented her confidence.
"It makes you question every game, the officials, the other coach, the players," she says.
"I wouldn't ever imagine any of the girls in my team or any of the other teams doing that. But I mean, I wouldn't know to be honest. I wouldn't think about it. I won't try to think it about it that way."
Chris Eaton, a former Interpol officer and former head of security at FIFA, has flagged serious concerns about at least one international gambling website facilitating live betting on these matches.
Mr Eaton says this site may be owned by criminals that have used other sites to facilitate match-fixing in international football.
"If you want to control not just the match fix but the betting fraud, [you] manage a piece of the market so that you can not only manipulate odds to the favour of a fix, but be in a better ... informational position to determine the flow of the fraudulent wagering," Mr Eaton says.
There is no evidence of such activity happening in Australia as a result of this site, and Sportradar's managing director of strategy and integrity, Andreas Krannich, defended Real Time Sportscasts' use of scouts at local games.
"Sending scouts [to] matches, to different sports, to smaller events, to big events, is not something which is putting the respective sport into trouble or into risk," he says.
"If we do not send our controlled scouts to these events, you will see the scouts coming from bookmakers, and they will not be controlled.
"When we developed our scout business, it was a natural reaction to the request from the bookmaker industry, and by taking over this service from the bookmakers, we made it transparent and we prevented the dodgy people going to the events.
"At the end of the day, it's not that we are generating a market. We are responding to a market."
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