With the 2014 FIFA World Cup now almost out of the group stage, it’s time for a quick whip round southeast Asia to check how the anti-football betting competition between the region’s police forces is shaking out.
In Singapore, police announced the dismantling of an illegal betting operation believed to have handled S$800k (US $640k) in wagers over the past two weeks. Police arrested 15 suspects, all but one of them male, while seizing computers, betting records and S$350k in cash.
In Malaysia, police arrested 31 suspects after conducting over 105 raids in Johor as part of their anti-wagering Ops Soga operation. Johor police chief Datuk Mohd Mokhtar Mohd Shariff said “almost 90% of the raids were conducted in public places such as restaurants and other open areas.” The suspects are believed to be agents and runners who handled wagers of over Rm 1m ($310k) for a larger betting ring by hanging around public venues featuring big-screen broadcasts of World Cup matches and taking wagers from spectators.
Mokhtar said that if police stood any chance of ‘crippling’ the betting syndicate, “we have to track down the ‘super agents.’ That will be the focus of our investigation” going forward. Kuala Lumpur deputy police chief Datuk Law Hong Soon said most World Cup betting was “made through overseas servers, hence why we need to work with Interpol. They are leading the operations to locate the masterminds.”
In Thailand, the ever-vigilant authorities announced they’d arrested 1,677 individuals between June 9-21 and shut down 675 illegal betting websites. Deputy police spokesman Anucha Romyanan said Thai bettors were “quite addicted to gambling” even when the World Cup wasn’t in session. Police have targeted a further 277 websites for closure in the coming days, but Maj-General Noraboon Naenna says some online bookies had prepared for this World Cup by creating so many different URLs that they were back online as fast as police could shut them down.
