Online sports betting operators are getting increasingly creative and/or desperate in their search for something on which their customers can wager.
The New Paper reported that Singapore-based bettors are being targeted by internationally licensed online betting sites offering wagers based on select countries – Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia – reporting new COVID-19 coronavirus infections.
The markets on offer aren’t specifically based on how many infections each country reports, but rather on whether the number is even or odd, or whether it’s over or under the previous day’s figure. Bettors can also wager on the last digit of each market’s report, similar to how unauthorized lotteries offer bets on the results of official lotteries in some Asia-Pacific countries.
The sites reportedly emerged in the week following Singapore suspending all gambling – even the online offering of Singapore Pools – through May 4 as a so-called ‘circuit breaker’ to reduce further COVID-19 transmission. Nature abhors a vacuum, after all, and here we are.
SPORTSBET SPANKED BY SECURITIES REGULATOR
The suspension of most live sports and racing events is forcing sportsbooks to think outside the box. In Australia, online betting operator Sportsbet has been publicly spanked by the Australian Securities & Investments Commission (ASIC) for offering bets on Aussie stock market movements.
On March 31, Sportsbet announced that it would start accepting wagers on whether the S&P/ASX 200 index would finish each day’s trading up or down, while also offering punters the option of betting on the final digit in the index score. But ASIC quickly intervened, reminding Sportsbet that the company wasn’t licensed to offer what amounted to a financial product.
Sportsbet, a division of UK-licensed gambling giant Flutter Entertainment, quickly withdrew the offering, apparently telling ASIC that the cockup was due to “challenges in implementing its control framework in the current environment, with many staff working remotely.”
WEST VIRGINIA ELECTION BETTING FIASCO EXPOSED
Perhaps West Virginia’s gambling regulators can use that ‘working from home’ excuse to explain how sports betting operator FanDuel was allowed to offer the first locally approved election wagers … for about an hour last week.
The saga began when FanDuel announced a number of betting markets on the 2020 US presidential election, only to pull the odds from their site just minutes later. The West Virginia Lottery, which regulates gambling activity in the state, apparently asked FanDuel to hold off while they rethought their decision.
This Monday, emails obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request revealed the truly haphazard means by which FanDuel came to believe it was good to go. It started on April 6 when DraftKings, another WV betting licensee, sent the Lottery a proposal to authorize election betting.
Lottery deputy director of security David Bradley responded on April 7, asking if DraftKings could limit their election bets to national elections to avoid breaking a state law that bans wagering anything of value on “any election held in this state.” Bradley sent similar requests to FanDuel and BetMGM, the joint venture of MGM Resorts and GVC Holdings.
Having received assurances from all three operators, Bradley issued an email saying the election betting proposal had been “Approved as submitted.” Later that day, FanDuel went live with its election markets, only to have Bradley send an email 20 minutes later saying “Please hold up on this. We are reconsidering.”
The following day, Lottery director John Myers issued a statement taking responsibility for the cockup, while everyone from Secretary of State Mac Warner to Gov. Jim Justice – whose Greenbrier Resort is the local partner of both FanDuel and BetMGM – called the whole concept of election betting a non-starter. Back to the drawing board…
