The Hong Kong Jockey Club says the volume of illegal online football bets in the city hit HK$500 billion last year (US$64 billion), but regulators have no plans to intervene to block the unlicensed Web sites taking the bets.
A spokesman for the Home Affairs Bureau, which is responsible for the territory’s gaming laws, said sufficient legislation is in place to police the industry and it would not follow the stringent measures currently under consideration in Singapore, where a bill was introduced this month requiring ISPs to block access to black market operators as part of a package of fines and stiff jail terms for offenders.
“Respecting freedom to access information, we do not block one’s Internet access,” the spokesman told the South China Morning Post. “We have adopted a multi-pronged strategy which includes regulation, law enforcement, public education and provision of counselling and treatment services.”
Losses by Hong Kong bettors are estimated to total $12 billion a year, and only a portion of it is channeled through the Jockey Club, the territory’s only legal online gambling network. The rest is characterized by Martin Pubrick, the club’s director of integrity and security, as a key contributor to the “international expansion and legitimization of organized crime,” and he blames the “massive wealth accumulated from suspicious funds channelled from China through Macau casinos by junket operators”.
Match-fixing is another serious concern. Experts term it a global epidemic, in football especially, though not exclusively, and Singapore’s crackdown is aimed in part at tackling an illicit cross-national trade with “significant ties to Hong Kong and Macau,” according to the Post.
Hong Kong police made 192 arrests related to illegal bookmaking in the first half of 2014, a lot of it tied to World Cup action, prompting the Hong Kong Football Association to hire fraud monitor Sportradar to track games.
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