(Corrects tense of transform in paragraph three)
By Matt Siegel and Colin Packham
SYDNEY, Jan 20 (Reuters) - The rise of mobile betting is
transforming global sports wagering faster than regulators can
react, flooding the industry with cash and potentially
contributing to corruption scandals like the one roiling world
tennis, experts and insiders say.
Allegations this week that tennis authorities failed to deal
with widespread match-fixing has rocked the game, following
similar allegations that have blighted cricket, football and
other sports.
The ubiquity of mobile phones and tablets has helped
transform bookmakers from operators of dingy, smoke-filled
betting shops into multi-billion dollar de facto tech firms,
pouring resources into developing apps and complex algorithms
and marketing to younger and broader demographics.
"We're no longer restricted by geography or the limited
choices of one betting company. And we have wall-to-wall sport
every day of the week from across the globe beamed into our
lounge rooms, on our smartphones," said Scott Ferguson, a
wagering industry consultant. "Technology is everything."
The greatest danger for mobile gambling to intersect with
corruption lies in the ease of fixing a one-on-one sport like
tennis, darts or snooker, according to experts and professional
gamblers.
Mobile apps that allow in-game betting on individual points
or games allow athletes to stealthily manipulate the results and
may strike some of them as less unethical as throwing an entire
match, said Sally Gainsbury, a senior lecturer at Southern Cross
University who has written a book on the subject.
"A PERFECT COMBINATION"
Most major bookmakers operate from small offshore
jurisdictions, making accurate predictions of industry worth
extremely difficult, said Gainsbury.
"There's a large grey sort of offshore market ... in every
country, where it's actually just not possible for the
government to regulate these sites that are based in all these
tiny remote jurisdictions," she told Reuters.
"So it's difficult to get a really accurate size of how much
people are betting because a lot of it is actually illegal."
Patrick Jay, a betting consultant and former sports and
football director at Ladbrokes , estimates the global sports
betting market is likely worth about $1 trillion a year, having
doubled in size in the last five years. He expects it to double
again in the next five.
The Australian government, citing a 2015 United Nations
conference at which Jay was a speaker, put that figure as high
as $3 trillion, of which 90 percent was "illegal" or in
contravention of laws regulating gambling in which the bet was
placed.
That range of figures, which includes betting on sports from
soccer, cricket and tennis to much less widely followed sports
like snooker, darts and table tennis but excludes racing,
illustrates the difficulty in accurately valuing the overall
market.
"It has grown because of mobile technology. It allows people
to place bets anywhere, anytime," Jay told Reuters. "People are
also dealing in credit, and therefore accounts are being run all
over the world. It has created a perfect combination."
Leading bookmakers including Betfair Group PLC BETF.L ,
Ladbrokes PLC LAD.L , Paddy Power PLC PLSA.I and William Hill
PLC WMH.L did not respond to requests for comment. There have
not been any allegations of wrongdoing by the bookmakers in the
World Tennis scandal.
Worried about the boom in sports betting and incidents of
match fixing, countries like Australia and across the European
Union are in the process of reviewing laws that experts like
Gainsbury say are "hopelessly outdated".
In Australia, for example, 2001 laws regulating Internet
sport betting bar anyone from placing a bet on a sporting event
online once it has begun, despite allowing live betting over the
phone or at retail bookmakers.
William Hill, an official partner of the Australian Open,
has a new "Bet-in-Play" feature for its Australian customers
that requires access to a smartphone's microphone while the bet
is placed to comply with such laws.
"There's been a lot of stagnation where a lot of countries
originally said, 'Well this is illegal, we won't let them do
this', but of course with the internet you can't make things
illegal and stop people going online," Gainsbury said.
(Writing by Matt Siegel; Editing by Lincoln Feast)