IBIA Logs 76 Suspicious Betting Alerts in Q2, With Esports Now a Fifth of All Cases

The International Betting Integrity Association reported 76 suspicious betting alerts to authorities in the second quarter of 2026, across nine sports, and the number has now risen for three consecutive quarters. The Q2 figure is up from 70 in Q1 2026 and 65 in Q2 2025, a 17% year-on-year increase, with IBIA noting the totals can still be revised as investigations continue.

Football remains the largest single source at 25 alerts, or 33% of the quarter, but the share that stands out is esports. It produced 16 alerts, 21% of the total, up from 15 in Q1 and now firmly the second-biggest category ahead of basketball on 10 and tennis on nine. The rest of the quarter was spread thin: five in darts, four in greyhound racing, three each in cricket and table tennis, and one in volleyball.

Where the alerts came from

The geography is where the report gets useful for anyone pricing integrity risk by market. Europe accounted for 33% of alerts, South America 22%, global events 21%, Africa 15%, and North America and Asia 4% each, with Oceania at 1%. Africa's share is notable because all of it came from a single sport.

Two clusters do most of the work. Kosovo alone generated five football alerts, and Paraguay produced five basketball alerts plus two in football, meaning two small markets account for roughly 16% of the entire quarter. The tennis and table tennis entries carry a common thread: two of the nine tennis alerts were passed to the International Tennis Integrity Agency as intelligence reports on unsanctioned events, and all three table tennis alerts sat outside International Table Tennis Federation competition. Events without a governing body's sanctioning are harder to police and keep showing up in the data.

IBIA's monitoring base gives the numbers scale. The association's membership covers more than 90 companies operating over 200 betting brands, and its system watches roughly 1.5 million sporting events a year across more than 80 sports, drawing on customer activity representing about $300 billion in global betting turnover. Against that denominator, 76 alerts is a small absolute count, which is the point: the alerts are exception reports flagged from operator-side customer data, not a measure of how much fixing occurs.

What it means for operators and affiliates

The esports trajectory is the line to watch. At 21% of alerts on a vertical that represents a fraction of regulated turnover, esports is generating integrity flags well out of proportion to its handle, and the pattern of alerts in lower-tier and unsanctioned events matches what the tennis and table tennis entries show. Operators expanding esports markets are adding a product where the alert rate per unit of turnover is high and the governing-body structure to act on a report is thinner than in football.

For affiliates, the practical read is jurisdictional. Traffic and content built around lower-division football in Kosovo, basketball in Paraguay and Colombia, or unsanctioned tennis circuits points at competitions where operators are most likely to suspend markets, void bets or restrict accounts, and where regulators are most likely to press. The concentration in leagues rather than in headline events is consistent across quarters, and it sits alongside the enforcement pressure now visible in US collegiate and professional betting integrity cases and in national crackdowns on unlicensed operators from Hong Kong to Indonesia. IBIA will publish revised figures if open investigations change the count.