Sports betting is skyrocketing. Will you dominate the Olympics?

That’s a lot of impressive shortcuts, but what do combinations like this actually do? Is it effective?

Watch detectives

For as long as legal sports gambling platforms have been around, people have tried to exploit them. This requires integrity agencies, which have existed in some form for decades.

Bjorn says these agencies evolved into their modern form in the early to mid-2000s as a response to widespread match-fixing scandals in professional tennis. These events led to the formation of the Tennis Integrity Unit in 2008, which Bjorn says was one of the first groups to rely heavily on data-driven analysis to proactively detect wrongdoing. By tracking live betting patterns across various sports betting sites and networks, the integrity agency can detect outwardly suspicious bets that may indicate collusion, match-fixing or some similar attempt to defraud the system.

For example, would some random matches in the second round in a small tournament result in a draw of 10 times the bet size of similar matches? This may appear suspicious to these agents, who can then coordinate with administrative agencies to investigate.

More such entities soon followed, including those that covered several sports.

“They saw outlets to go to other leagues or sporting events or [government] “The organizers say: ‘We can monitor this,’” says Björn. “We can start using big data.”

Integrity monitors are now ubiquitous in the regulated sports gambling market. IC360 (formerly US Integrity) is most popular within the US, while the International Betting Integrity Association is a major player globally as well as in part of the US. Bjorn’s company Plannatech works with these entities and others, using its full risk management platform to help analyze incoming bets in real-time to detect anomalies.

These agencies obtain live betting data from betting platforms around the world and use it to spot potential signs of misconduct — for example, large bets coming in on the underdog within an hour of a game starting — and send alerts to sports leagues, federations and casinos about suspicious patterns.

“They actually have a dashboard where you can see betting flows on specific sports,” Björn says. “They review things, partner with the leagues, and monitor the referees.”

In some cases, these patterns cannot be discovered until after they have occurred. In 2024, it was revealed that former basketball player Jontay Porter was involved in a betting scandal, and it was a suspicious pattern of betting and behavior that led to the fraud being discovered. Porter claimed an injury or illness and was withdrawn from two plays early in the first quarter. His co-conspirators would bet on how many points or rebounds he would collect, and Porter would guarantee the success of those bets by removing himself from the game.

The vast majority of alerts identified by integrity teams ultimately do not reveal any concerns. However, the 2 or 3 percent that do, can be valuable to weed out potential scams.

The Olympic Games involve many of the same challenges that face integrity agencies. The IOC cooperates with IBIA to monitor integrity, and says it has a joint integrity unit comprising Interpol, UNODC and other global regulatory authorities for each Games. The IOC also has a number of strict rules, including not allowing anyone approved for the Games to bet on any Olympic event. The Commission also uses several forms of pre-event risk modeling as it tracks various Olympic sports in non-Olympic and qualifying environments to expand its baseline betting and outcome trends.