Interpol said that more than 4,000 people have been arrested worldwide and more than $13M seized across Asia "in operations targeting illegal gambling during the Euro 2016 football tournament," according to Lefevre & Zaharia of REUTERS. The global police cooperation agency, which called the operation the "most significant in recent years," said more than 4,000 raids were carried out across China, France, Greece, Italy, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam during Operation SOGA VI (short for football gambling) on dens estimated to have handled $649M worth of bets. Interpol said that "a second operation targeted transnational networks behind illegal websites and call-center type operations" (REUTERS, 7/18).
UNCONVINCED: The PA reported it is the "sixth investigation into football gambling by Interpol." Interpol said that the six SOGA operations "have resulted in more than 12,500 arrests," the seizure of £40M ($53M) in cash and the closure of more than 3,400 operations that handled almost £4.85B ($6.4B) worth of bets. But "as impressive as these numbers look," one of the world's foremost experts on illegal betting and match-fixing "is unconvinced that Interpol's approach is working." Chris Eaton, a former senior policeman from Australia who has since worked for Interpol and the Int'l Centre for Sports Security in Qatar, said, "Interpol has been coordinating anti-sport gambling operations in Asia for years now, always with big arrest and seizure figures of the easy-to-detect smaller street operators. The big organized online gambling operators turning over billions -- often infiltrated if not controlled by criminals in safe-haven countries like the Philippines and Malaysia -- escape this attention" (PA, 7/18).
