Dr Ordway, who is a member of the Asian Racing Federation’s Council on Anti-Illegal Betting and Related Financial Crime, called on the ICC to sever any ties with the bookmakers in question, such as ensuring their live data and odds on its games are not made available to the bookmakers.
The threat of fixing in women’s cricket is a real one: Bangladesh international Shohaly Akhter was recently given a five-year ban for multiple breaches of the ICC Anti-Corruption Code. The breaches related to approaches to corrupt players connected to the 2023 T20 Women’s World Cup.
A report in the Daily Telegraph in May 2025 raised concerns about betting on women’s cricket in England and highlighted the minimal security at venues, which allows scouts to collect data unhindered.
Offshore betting companies routinely offer in-play betting on games in England. For example, when Hampshire played The Blaze in the Metro Cup in the summer of 2025, the game was available for in-play betting on both 1Win and 1xBet.
As these screenshots show, English women’s games were available for inplay betting on illegal betting websites in the summer of 2025, because data was being collected from these matches.
Players face abuse from disappointed bettors
Women’s games can attract large bets. The same day as this match, a Lancashire vs Essex game was also offered by 1Win and streamed live on YouTube, where one watcher commented: “Women’s matches are the only match that gives 10x return very frequently.”
Betting is often discussed in the comments section of livestreams. Comments on YouTube for another game between Somerset and Durham in that season’s Metro Cup include one viewer mentioning they lost 45k (the currency is not disclosed).
In other sports, angry bettors who have lost money on bets have harassed players on social media.
Last summer, the English Cricket Board (ECB) launched a survey on women’s players at the top level. The results have not been made public, but it is understood that more than 50% of players experienced harassment on social media. Play the Game asked the ECB how much of this abuse was betting-related, but did not get a response to this question.
According to Dr. Catherine Ordway, research shows that women athletes report disproportionate and sexualised abuse from bettors.
“Unregulated operators are unlikely to enforce user behaviour standards, require identity verification, or conduct moderation. This increases the likelihood of threats and coercion,” she says.
“If betting operators also have associations with pornography and adult entertainment, legal or otherwise, it is not only going to undermine efforts to position women’s sport as safe, inclusive, and community centred, but it potentially exposes players – especially younger or lower paid women – to predatory approaches,” she continues.
Anti-corruption officers trained and sent by England’s Cricket Regulator ejected more than 100 unofficial data scouts from women’s games during the 2025 season, including the T20 County Cup, which includes sides from the lowest professional level, Tier 3.
The ECB is currently procuring a new data contract. This will allow the successful company to send accredited data collectors to all domestic men’s and women’s competitions to collect live match information for betting purposes.
This deal would also allow the appointed company to collate match data from a TV feed. Given the ubiquity of these livestreams, it is unclear quite how the ECB’s new data partner proposes to protect the exclusivity of these deals.
Unofficial competitions are feeding betting markets
Another integrity concern comes from games played in unofficial competitions.
The number one location of 1xBet’s live cricket betting offerings is India, where unofficial competitions are taking place at venues like the Shri Krishna Cricket Academy in Sidipur, on the outskirts of Delhi with as many as six games in a day, every day of the week.
It is known as the Agra District Women’s League, a reference to a location hundreds of kilometres away, and it is a competition with little online presence outside of its semi-permant status on a small number of betting sites like 1xBet and the CricHeroes streaming service.
It is so far outside the structures of organised cricket that teams do not change ends at the completion of an over, an occurrence that should usually happen every few minutes.
This makes it possible to stream the matches with just a single camera, set up at the southern end of the ground. Not changing ends ensures the batter will always be facing viewers (which is the standard practice for cricket broadcasts) when she receives the ball.
Satellite imagery sheds more light on this competition’s unusual setup. Professional cricket grounds place a sight screen at either end of the field. These are large screens designed to give the batter better visibility of the ball as it is delivered.
On the live streams from Shri Krishna, one can be seen behind the batter (left photo below). While viewers would presume another is installed behind the bowler, Google Maps reveals this is not the case (right photo below).
Therefore, the sightscreen simply acts like a prop, giving no assistance to the batter, but it gives viewers a sense of the competition being at a higher level of professionalism.
Screenshot and a satellite image showing the cricket pitch at the Shri Krishna stadium in India.
Play the Game attempted to contact the competition organisers and those involved in the games, but was unable to reach them.
The Agra District Women’s League is one of dozens of competitions of questionable origin that are producing content for bookmakers like 1xBet at all hours of the day.
As investigations by Josimar and Bellingcat have shown, there are warehouses set up across Eastern Europe to pump out live data and livestreams in sports ranging from volleyball to football to tennis.
India is doing the same with cricket. One competition on offer on Russia-linked gambling sites produced odds around the clock, day after day. On the last day of January alone, 1xBet and 1Win both featured live odds and streams for 40 games from an indoor league.
While this and most other similar competitions are for male competitors, 1xBet and 1Win were found to be offering live odds on a women’s T10 indoor competition that operated 12-hours per day.
“There’s plenty of appetite for women’s cricket now, and so much at a decent level that it seems like overkill to go to this level,” said an experienced cricket trader who works with a major European licensed betting operator, but was not authorised to speak publicly.
Popular cricket websites such as Cricinfo and Cricbuzz typically list vast amounts of games, but many low-level games that Play the Game found on the betting market were typically not on those sites.
“There’s so much now on Cricinfo and Cricbuzz, and people are checking these sites for info,” said the trader. “If these games are not on there, then that tells you something.
“I don’t see how there is really any money that can be made on this unless it’s dodgy money. My guess is that this level is just there for money-laundering and other dodgy reasons.”
It remains unclear who supplies the data
Play the Game spoke to organisers of two low-level men’s competitions whose games were offered for betting on 1xBet. Neither was aware of how their games had appeared there for in-play betting, and the situation probably also applies to women’s games.
The computer code and data feeds used by 1xBet, 1Win and MostBet do not reveal the sources of their live data (in contrast to what can be found on the websites of many other bookmakers).
However, for international competitions like the Women’s T20 World Cup and its qualifiers, the ICC has a deal in place with Stats Perform.
Play the Game asked Stats Perform and the other two major data companies, Genius and Sportradar, if they were collecting and supplying data from these events to unlicensed betting companies that sponsor porn.
Sportradar confirmed it offered data from these ICC qualifiers but did not supply it to 1xBet, 1Win or Mostbet. Genius and Stats Perform did not reply