Suspicious betting alerts in esports: what the IBIA numbers mean

Four times a year, a body backed by betting companies publishes a count of the betting its members found suspicious. In each quarter of the first half of 2026, esports was among the three sports with the most alerts, behind football every time. The figure is quoted often, and it is easy to read as a measure of how much match-fixing there is in esports. It is not, and the difference matters to players, teams, organizers and anyone who follows the integrity of the scene.

This guide explains where the number comes from. It covers the body that publishes it, what an alert is and is not, how often the figures appear, what the first two quarters of 2026 showed for esports, why esports alerts carry no country, how to read the percentages, what the reports leave out, and how a suspicion in a betting market can become a sanction in esports. It does not name any game, event or team: the reports do not name them either.

International Betting Integrity Association, quarterly reports for the first and second quarters of 2026 and its 2025 annual report.

Who counts the alerts

The figures come from the International Betting Integrity Association, known as IBIA. Its reports describe a membership of more than 90 companies with more than 200 betting brands: its members are the companies that take the bets.

The association runs what it calls the Global Monitoring and Alert Platform. According to its reports, the platform monitors more than 1.5 million sporting events a year across more than 80 sports, and analyzes customer activity across more than US$300 billion of global betting turnover a year.

Its services are approved in several markets. The second-quarter report of 2026 lists the places where IBIA's services are licensed, approved or meet regulatory requirements: the Netherlands, Germany, 32 US states, Brazil, Ontario and Alberta. The first-quarter report gave the same list without Alberta, a Canadian province whose online market the second report discusses.

Monitoring is not its only activity. IBIA's page on the second-quarter report presents its work in three parts: monitoring in viable regulated markets, alerts to the relevant authorities, and education that helps athletes recognize and report integrity risks. The same report describes a program in Canada, funded with CA$300,000 by IBIA and three betting operators, that had reached nearly 200 players and staff of the Canadian Premier League and had been extended to athletes of the Canadian Football League.

Two points follow from this structure. The data comes from regulated operators that are members of the association, not from the whole betting market. And IBIA is an industry body, not a regulator or a court: it reports, others investigate and decide.

What an alert is

IBIA's reports define an alert in few words. Each one is a suspicious betting alert reported to the relevant authorities. IBIA's page on the second-quarter report puts the role of alerts in one line: they flag suspicious activity to those authorities.

In plain terms, an alert records that betting on an event looked abnormal to the companies that took the bets, enough for the association to pass it on. It does not say who placed the bets, whether a player was involved, or whether the event was manipulated. Those questions belong to the bodies that receive the alert: the integrity unit of a sport, a regulator or the police.

The count is also provisional. Each quarterly report carries the same note under its total: "This figure may be revised depending on the outcome of any ongoing investigations." A figure printed in a quarterly report is therefore a snapshot, not a final record.

The reports and the proven cases

The gap between alerts and proven cases shows in IBIA's own annual figures. On February 3, 2026, the association published its 2025 report. It counted 300 suspicious betting alerts reported to the relevant authorities during the year, up 29 percent from 232 in 2024. IBIA attributed the rise to wider monitoring coverage and better analysis.

The same release gave outcomes linked to the association's work. Intelligence from its member operators contributed to 54 matches being proven corrupted, and sanctions involving IBIA data were imposed on 24 players, teams and officials across five sports. The release does not link those outcomes to particular alerts. Set side by side, the two figures still show that the alert count is much larger than the count of established cases.

The annual release named football, with 110 alerts, and tennis, with 74, as the sports with the most alerts in 2025, across 16 sports in all. It did not give a figure for esports.

IBIA publishes a report for each quarter and one for the full year. The dated record for 2026 runs as follows. The 2025 annual report was released on February 3. The first-quarter report was in circulation by April 9, when the trade publication SBC Americas reported its figures. The second-quarter report was reported by the trade publication Asia Gaming Brief on July 23.

The quarterly documents themselves carry no publication date. They do carry the period covered, the total, a breakdown by sport and a breakdown by region, with notes on particular cases. From one report to the next, the number of sports changes, and each total may be revised later.

The first two quarters of 2026

In the first quarter of 2026, IBIA reported 70 alerts across 10 sports. Football led with 25, tennis followed with 16 and esports came third with 15. In the second quarter it reported 76 alerts across nine sports. Football again had 25, and esports moved to second place with 16, ahead of basketball with 10 and tennis with 9.

Across the two quarters, esports accounts for 31 of 146 alerts, a little over a fifth. IBIA's page on the second-quarter report put the point in its own terms: football and esports together made up more than half of the total.

The tennis row shows why a sport's rank can move with almost no change in its own figure. Tennis dropped from 16 alerts to 9, and esports rose by only one alert, from 15 to 16, yet that was enough to move it from third place to second. The report also notes that six of the first-quarter tennis alerts concerned events outside the main professional tours, and that two second-quarter tennis alerts went to the sport's integrity agency as intelligence reports for the same reason.

Why esports has no country

Every other sport in IBIA's reports is assigned to a region, following the United Nations classification of countries, with Cyprus placed in Europe. Esports is not. The first-quarter report explains that esports alerts are not attributed to a specific country or continent because event locations can be transnational. The second-quarter report gives the same reason for what it calls Global alerts.

The practical result is that esports appears in the regional breakdown as a region of its own. In both quarters of 2026, the Global row was made up of esports alerts and nothing else: 15 in the first quarter and all 16 in the second.

The consequence for readers is that esports cannot be compared region by region with other sports in these reports. A reader cannot tell from them whether the esports alerts concern European leagues, Asian tournaments or online qualifiers.

How the regions moved between quarters

The regional breakdown shows how stable the esports share was while the rest of the map changed. In the first quarter, Europe held 28 percent of the alerts, North America 20 percent, Asia 13 percent, and Africa and South America 9 percent each, with the Global row at 21 percent. In the second quarter, Europe rose to 33 percent and South America to 22 percent, while North America fell to 4 percent and Asia to 4 percent.

The other sports are tied to countries in the first-quarter report: Mexico alone accounted for eight football alerts, Czechia for four table tennis alerts, Chile for three tennis alerts. Those country lines are what move a region's share from one quarter to the next. The esports line has no country to move, and the Global row stayed at 21 percent in both reports.

Reading the percentages

The percentages in the reports are rounded, and small counts make rounding visible. In the first-quarter report, the 15 esports alerts appear as 22 percent in the breakdown by sport and as 21 percent in the breakdown by region. Fifteen out of 70 is 21.4 percent, so the two printed figures describe the same count, rounded differently. In the second quarter, 16 out of 76 is 21 percent in both places.

Small numbers also move a lot. A change of a few alerts in one sport can shift every share in the report, because the shares are calculated on a total that itself changes each quarter. Football kept exactly 25 alerts in both quarters, but its share fell from 36 percent to 33 percent because the total rose from 70 to 76.

A share of suspicious alerts tells how often betting on a sport looked wrong to regulated operators. It does not tell how often a match was fixed.

Two further limits apply. The count covers regulated operators that belong to the association only. And, as each report says, the total may be revised once investigations end.

What the reports do not say about esports

The quarterly reports name no game, no tournament, no team and no player. They give no amount of money involved, no number of accounts and no operator. They do not split esports alerts by game, so the 31 alerts of the first half of 2026 cannot be attributed to Counter-Strike 2, Dota 2, League of Legends or any other title from these documents.

Nor do they cover betting outside the regulated market. Riot Games, publisher of League of Legends and Valorant, said in June 2025 that 70 percent of bets across all sports are placed in unregulated markets with unlicensed bookmakers. Whatever the true share, an association of regulated operators sees only the bets its members take. Suspicious activity elsewhere does not appear in its count.

IBIA makes this argument itself. Its page on the second-quarter report says that competitive regulation, citing the recent opening of Alberta's market, can move betting activity into monitored channels. The report backs the point with figures from the research firm H2 Gambling Capital for Ontario, where the regulated channel's share of gross gambling revenue, the money operators keep after paying winnings, rose from 5 percent in 2022 to 85 percent in 2023 and has stayed above 90 percent since. The quarterly reports do not say which markets the esports alerts came from.

Finally, the reports do not say what became of the esports alerts. IBIA's annual release for 2025 gave sanction figures across five sports without listing them, and gave no esports outcome.

From a suspicion to a sanction

In esports, the bodies that turn suspicion into a sanction are the publishers, the organizers and the Esports Integrity Commission, known as ESIC, whose Anti-Corruption Code applies at the competitions of its member organizers. Their decisions, not the alert counts, are the published record of what was proven.

A ruling of April 1, 2026 shows how betting data can feed such a case. ESIC sanctioned the Counter-Strike 2 player nifee for four years over match manipulation and betting-related corruption during ESL Pro League Season 22, played in October 2025. The commission said it found repeated in-game deaths of one kind that coincided with unusual spikes in betting on a market tied to that specific in-game incident. The accounts behind the bets were newly created, dormant or high-value, and the activity fell well outside normal levels for that kind of market.

The investigation that followed included a formal interview, requests for information and written submissions, with the player legally represented. He first denied wrongdoing and later admitted the conduct. ESIC said it was still working with international law enforcement and integrity partners on other individuals.

The ruling names Runestone as the partner with which the suspicious betting was identified. It does not mention IBIA, and it does not say whether the case appeared in any alert count. ESIC added that markets on single in-game incidents carry an acute risk, because one isolated incident can be manipulated, and said it would act where evidence shows such a market has been targeted. The commission also said a five-year sanction would normally have applied, and reduced it because the player admitted the conduct and helped the wider investigation.

The case illustrates the distance between the two kinds of number. An alert count measures how often betting looked abnormal. A sanction requires gameplay evidence, an investigation and a decision by the body that runs or governs the competition.

Who else watches esports betting

Some publishers add their own monitoring alongside the alert system. When Riot Games opened betting sponsorships to its top-tier League of Legends and Valorant teams in the Americas and in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, in a text published on June 26, 2025, it required every team pursuing such a deal to run an internal integrity program covering policy, monitoring and education. Riot also required betting partners to use its official data source, and said the program would improve its own ability to monitor betting activity for policy violations.

These arrangements sit beside IBIA's count, not inside it. A publisher's monitoring, an integrity commission's investigations and the operators' alert platform each look at the same markets from a different position, and each reports to its own audience.

Why the count matters anyway

For all its limits, the series is a regular, public measure of suspicious betting that sets esports beside traditional sports, from the companies that take the bets, published every quarter.

For organizers and publishers, a steady share around a fifth of all alerts is a signal of where operators see risk. For players and teams, it is a reminder that betting markets on their matches are watched, including the markets on single in-game events that the April ruling described. For readers, it is a number to be quoted with its definition attached: suspicious betting alerts reported by regulated operators, provisional, and without any finding of guilt.

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