The International Betting Integrity Association (IBIA) has published its report for Q1 2021, featuring a special focus on basketball alerts between 2017 and 2020.

Publishing its figures, the IBIA showed that it had been granted access to 50,000 matches by its member organisations over the three-year period, recording just nine suspicious alerts.

This equates to only one alert for every 5,400 matches, with suspicious betting activity occurring in only 0.02% of fixtures.

In contrast, tennis, esports and football constituted 75% of the 64 alerts reported in the first quarter of 2021, accounting for 18, 17 and 12 respectively.

The organisation has emphasised, however, that this figure is ‘broadly similar to the 68 cases reported in Q4 2020 and 61 recorded in the first quarter of 2020.

Following the three aforementioned sports, table tennis accounted for seven cases, followed by basketball at five and volleyball at four, whilst only one was generated by horse racing.

The figure for table tennis in particular was noted as a significant drop when compared to the 26 alerts recorded for Q2 2020, with the seven alerts reported remaining consistent with the alerts for the third and fourth quarters of 2020.

Additionally, Europe and Asia were identified as the continents where the majority of suspicious betting alerts originated, accounting for 66% of total cases.

A quarter of warnings were generated in Russia and Bulgaria at 10 and six respectively, whilst overall cases were spread across 20 different countries.

Source – International Betting Integrity Association YouTube Channel