Corruption Alert! Referees Bet on Tennis before Fixing Games

Two umpires have been banned from tennis for life owing to being involved in a tennis betting scam. Four others can expect the same fate due to serious charges of corruption related to the ways to bet on tennis. 

It has been revealed that some referees from Kazakhstan, Turkey and Ukraine manipulated the scores in ITF Futures Tours, so that bettors could take their bets step by step during the match, since they were aware of the next steps in advance.

The exact details and consequences of these illegal actions have not been publicized yet. Tennis authorities noticed only a few federations and directors since the International Tennis Federation wanted to keep it in secret.

However, according to online sports news, these unlawful acts have been detected in connection to online tennis betting. One of the Kazakh’s referees, Kirill Parfenov was decertified for life in February 2015 due to contacting another official on Facebook with an intention to manipulate the results of matches.

Croatia’s Denis Pitner was suspended for 12 months starting from August 2015 for logging on to a betting account regularly. From that account, bets were placed on tennis matches.

Based on figures from the European Sports Security Association, over 40 suspicious gambling alerts were raised about tennis in the first nine months of 2015. Just to make a short comparison in terms of other sports, only 16 alerts were raised during the same period altogether.

These developments shed new light on the growing extent of corruption in tennis betting odds and raised concerns about the lack of clarity in the governing body of tennis.

According to online betting news the sport get extremely high attention during the Australian Open this year, when  world No.1 Novak Djokovic acknowledged that he was approached to fix a match earlier in his sport career.

As a result of the high level of dishonesty in terms of the ways to bet on tennis, authorities –  the Association of Tennis Professionals, the Women’s Tennis Association and the International Tennis Federation –  issued an independent investigation into the cases of corruption.