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Indian police have claimed their demands to have Betfair blocked in the country were ignored ahead of last week’s raid on a £57m-a-month illegal betting racket in which the exchange was being used to bet on Indian Premier League cricket matches.
Mumbai Police arrested six men in a raid on an illegal betting den in Kandivli last week, where they found the accused placing bets on cricket on Betfair.com “on a ball-to-ball basis, over-to-over basis, and on runs made by batsmen or conceded by bowlers,” a crime branch officer told The Nation newspaper. With betting on sports other than horse racing illegal in India, police alleged the Pakistan-based gang controlling the operation had got a contact in the UK to open an account with Betfair.com and passed on the passwords to the arrested men.
A Betfair spokesman commented to Casino Choice: “‘Spot betting’ on the IPL is not available on Betfair and Betfair supports federal regulation of the betting industry in India.”
Police also revealed that they had written to the Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) in New Delhi around 12 months ago requesting that access to the Betfair.com website be blocked in India, but that this request had been ignored.
One of the arrested men, Sonu Yogendra Jalan, also claimed following his arrest that a Sri Lankan cricket player in the IPL had been paid Rs10 crore (£1.1m) for fixing an IPL match, and that Indian cricketers had also accepted bribes, according to The Times of India. The turnover of the illegal betting network controlled by Jalan and another bookmaker was approximately RS500 crore (£56.9m) a month.
Legal gambling options within India are limited, with only lotteries and betting at trackside on horse racing allowed across the country, with land based casinos only allowed in two states - Goa and Sikkim. The remote Himalayan province of Sikkim, where the local Playwin lottery also offers products online across India, however passed a law and attempted to issue licences for online gambling back in 2009/10. William Hill, bwin and Betfair all confirmed their interest in partnering with local companies but the licences failed to materialise.
May 2011 saw India pass the Federal Information Technology Act, which made blocking offshore betting websites the responsibility of Internet Service Providers in the country. There is however a strong lobby within the Indian parliament in favour of legalising onlne betting in order to mitigate the risk of betting-related corruption of sport in the country via illegal bookmakers and criminals’ use of the proceeds to fund crime and terrorism.
