When Gambling Goes Online
The world wide web now boasts of an estimated 15,000 sports betting websites, including some 13,000 illegal ones, shuffling around a staggering 15 billion euros (23.6 billion dollars) a year, according to this article - a number that is leading to concerns about global corruption, money laundering and gambling addiction. The amount of money traded on a single website can surpass 100,000 euros for a match in the third division football in Romania, or even the first division of the Czech women’s league, and it is estimated that 85% of these websites have been created for the sole purpose of “washing away” dirty money. According to one estimate, French gamblers place sports bets worth more than 510 million euros on the Internet every year, of which, only around 12 million euros is believed to be legal (via the French National Lottery, the only authorised online sports betting operator in the country).
According to Declan Hill, a journalist and British expert on the problem, the amount of corruption in global sports has increased almost 100-fold in the past five years thanks to Internet-based gambling.
Filed under: Business, Digital culture, Statistics