Several factors enter into the investigation of cases of manipulation of football matches for illicit gain on betting sites, known as “bets”. But the trigger for the report and subsequent analysis is usually an alert issued by a betting integrity service, run by industry monitoring companies.
This service can be contracted by sports confederations and by the “bets” themselves. Recently, the Ministry of Finance entered into a partnership with four institutions specialized in scanning the market and indicating suspicious bets.
According to Mariana Chamelette, vice-president of the TJD-SP (São Paulo football Court of Sports Justice), the reports that attest to the possibility of fraud “have similar precision to that of the biological passport, used in anti-doping tests”. In other words, she says, they have a high level of reliability.
When these complaints reach the criminal justice system, the path is to follow the money and identify the bettors, unraveling their relationships with each other and with the athletes allegedly responsible for the manipulations. In the sporting sphere, the technical analysis of plays gains weight.
From each report, there is a technical analysis of the player’s movements that led to the suspicious bets. If they were, for example, for an athlete to receive a yellow card — as in the case of striker Bruno Henrique, from Flamengo, under investigation —, his gestures in the disciplinary area are observed carefully.
In the case of a goalkeeper punished in the fourth division of the Campeonato Paulista, the situation was a goal, not a card. One of the pieces of evidence attached to the case was a video of the formation of the barrier during the free kick, with a very atypical pattern for that archer. The recording was key in the expert report that supported the conviction.
When the complaint is made, the sports magistrate usually summons a football arbitration ombudsman. There are different procedures, but in some courts the arbitrator responsible for this expertise does not have access to the bet monitoring report. In São Paulo, says Chamelette, “he starts the work from scratch and is based only on records of games that show signs of manipulation.”
Investigations tend to take time, as it is necessary to build a solid complaint before formalizing the complaint. And, in the case of state sports courts, even after conviction, it is possible to appeal to the national STJD (Superior Court of Sports Justice).
When the incident being investigated is in the Brazilian Championship, as in the situation that led to the search and seizure warrant against striker Bruno Henrique, the process in the sporting sphere already begins at the STJD, although there is always the possibility of appealing to the last instance, the Plenary from the STJD itself.
In the case of Bruno Henrique, it was the return of R$13,850 from three betting operators on a yellow card against the athlete that activated the alerts from Sportradar and Ibia (International Betting Integrity Association), both contracted by Conmebol (South American Confederation of Football). The continental confederation forwarded the document to the CBF (Brazilian Football Confederation), which took the case to the sports court.
From then on, the expert’s work involves analyzing the suspected player’s moves frame by frame. In the nine cases considered by the São Paulo Sports Court since 2020, the technician’s verdict was the same as that of the monitoring company.
But bookmakers would like faster results. Lawyer and consultant for ANJL (National Association of Games and Lotteries), Ana Bárbara Costa Teixeira, assesses that the waiting time still represents a risk.
“When the risk sector identifies a suspicious operation, bet does not pay anyone. According to the secretariat’s rules, we will have to open an investigation process”, said Teixeira.
Another bottleneck noted by the sector is that smaller “bets”, for reasons of cost, fail to hire sports fraud detection services, which can go unnoticed.
Although part of the financial loss from result manipulation falls on the bookmakers, the Public Ministry of Goiás, responsible for Operation Maximum Penalty against fraud in football matches, states that there was an omission on the part of the websites that did not report it. It was the complaint from the president of the Goiás club Vila Nova, Hugo Jorge Bravo, that initiated the biggest recent operation against fraud in the sport.
