The Global Lottery Monitoring System (GLMS) alerted its members and partners to four “seemingly suspicious” games in March.

Publishing its April 2022 newsletter, the GLMS issued the alert after completing its essential investigations, while the industry watchdog also developed five analysis-reports after requests from members and partners.

These analysis reports probed past games to “determine whether the risk of manipulation motivated by betting was highly probable or not”.

Ludovico Calvi, GLMS President, commented: “Our Operational team has been actively looking into various suspicious betting patterns and information requested by members to facilitate their internal investigations, at the disciplinary, internal lottery and criminal investigation level.

“Of course, this work is facilitated by a better understanding of the landscape and of what GLMS and its members are actually able to do in terms of risk assessments, analyses and provision of relevant intelligence in tackling potential manipulations of sport competitions.”

The GLMS also worked with national lotteries offering sports betting to access more information, as regulatory authorities and law enforcement received guidance.

“We delivered education sessions, including together with some of our partners in an inter-stakeholder approach, fostering awareness raising on sport integrity matters,” Calvi added.

“We are also in full preparation of several educational events as we come into the spring season, and are preparing our members to look out for potentially dangerous fixtures across sports and tournaments in the next couple of months.”

The GLMS team raised eight fixture alerts in February, with a ‘successful’ monitoring operation of the Beijing Winter Olympics, as well as completion of its monitoring of the AFCON 2022 tournament that began in January.

With five fixtures flagged by the GLMS in January, March’s figures were the lowest of the calendar year so far.