US sportsbook operators issued a statement on Monday this week announcing that they have formed a new, nation-wide non-profit organization tasked with helping them monitor integrity and fraudulent practices.
This at a time when, following New Jersey’s lead, more and more states are legalizing sports betting in the wake of the Supreme court’s decision to dump the PASPA law that for more than two decades had prohibited sports wagering in 46 of the US’s 50 states.
A first-of-its-kind organization in the US, the new body is to be known as the Sports Wagering Integrity Monitoring Association (SWIMA) and it will partner state and tribal gaming regulators, law enforcement agencies and other stakeholders.
“Our aim is to ensure a safe and secure betting environment for consumers across the country,” said George Rover, a former New Jersey assistant attorney general and gaming regulator who has been appointed as SWIMA Chief Integrity Officer.
Sportsbooks, eight of which have been operating in New Jersey since June when the Garden State became the first to sign sports betting into law, as well as state regulators and sports bodies like the NFL and NBA have, since inception, been monitoring an industry that outside of Nevada where it has never been illegal, is new to the US.
This has included checks on unusual betting patterns, insider and other suspicious activity.
But they believe that sportsbooks throughout the US should be working together to maintain the integrity of their gaming industry.
They therefore see a major function of SWIMA as being to inform, through a central hub, all US sportsbook operators when they discover suspicious wagers and other fraudulent activity.
“The key is to ensure that sportsbook operators are able to connect,” Rover told Reuters in an interview after Monday’s SWIMA statement.