Olympics Partners with Online Casinos to Prevent Corruption
The International Olympic Committee announced it would create a new division designed to detect and prevent gambling corruption of its events. The division, known as International Sports Monitoring, will team with hundreds of online casinos and sports betting operators to guard against gaming influences on match results.The ISM will locate in Switzerland, and is expected to be operational before the Winter Olympics of 2010, to be held in Vancouver.
The program will assess data reported by as many as four hundred gambling operations and Internet casinos, using the information to spot suspicious movement in betting odds. It will build on the FIFA Early Warning System, which used bet info to watch for irregular patterns at the Beijing Games.
The concept continues along the European model, in which sports governing bodies in soccer and tennis have partnered with online gambling operators to fight their mutual enemies, the match-fixers. US sports league have taken a different tack, trying to ban legal online gambling and effectively losing their best hope at guarding against fixed games.
The dedication to starting the ISM now will give the Olympic Committee a two-year headstart on the London Summer Olympics in 2012.
