North America remains a safe environment for betting activity, according to Sportradar Integrity Services’ betting corruption and match-fixing review.

Of the approximately 850,000 events analyzed across 70 sports Sportradar detected 1,329 suspicious matches across 11 sports, which is no significant difference compared to 2022.

Just 35 of these matches were held in North America which demonstrates how the region remains an area with limited instances of suspicious wagering. Despite this number increasing from 24 in 2022, North America’s results still remain lower than a number of other regions.

Europe led the way with 667 suspicious matches, up from 630 in 2022, followed by Asia where 302 suspicious matches were held (240 in 2022). Like last year, Oceania remained the only region to not have any suspicious activity.

Of the individual sports, soccer remained top in match-fixing with 880 instances of suspicious activity in 2023, up from 775 for the year prior. This result is not unexpected given the fact that soccer is the most popular sport worldwide. 23 of the suspicious matches were from Africa and North America combined.

Basketball finished second with 205 suspicious matches followed by table tennis with 70, up from 62 last year.

A new weapon in the Sportradar arsenal

Sportradar’s ability to monitor matches was bolstered by artificial intelligence, which detected 73% of all suspicious matches in 2023. AI detected 977 suspicious matches which was a 123% increase from 2022. The company integrated artificial intelligence into its Universal Fraud Detection System, which launched in 2005.

“2023 saw significant advancements in Sportradar’s technology capabilities. Our ongoing investment and innovation in the technology fuelling the UFDS have enabled it to monitor sporting events at a more advanced level, and identify more suspicious incidents than ever before,” said Sportradar EVP of Integrity, Rights Protection and Regulatory Services Andreas Krannich. “This AI-driven technology has firmly established itself as the gold standard in sports-betting corruption detection, enhancing our ability to detect diverse forms of match-fixing.”

Despite instances of suspicious activity increasing in most categories, Sportradar determined that 99.5% of sporting events are free from match-fixing as no sport has a suspicious match ratio greater than 1%.