About fighting match fixing by Declan Hill

His article in full here.

Another article with more emphasis in the RoPS case here:

Quoting Mr. Hill:

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FIFA Early Warning System Congress and Seminar
25 March 2011  - 26 March 2011
Zurich, Switzerland
A good start, but almost totally useless.
Why?
Some of the people, but by no means everyone, in FIFA and the sports world, are corrupt. They know it. We know it. They know, we know it. Therefore, right from the beginning there is a credibility issue.
Two, most of the people actually giving speeches about fighting crime in sports know very little about crime and criminals. There is now a host of ‘consultants’ and ‘experts’ in sports corruption. They know little.
Three, the most interesting people are from the private company that FIFA leaders founded ‘the Early Warning System’. For the most part, their executives are deeply honest and refreshingly forthright about the problems they face in monitoring gambling markets for corruption.
Their essential problem is that they are trying to figure out corruption in football matches just from watching the changes in the odds in the betting market. This like trying to spot insider trading from reading the stock market listings in the newspaper. You can get certain information (a stock moves sharply up or down), but it does not necessarily mean corruption.
They also have difficultly getting complete and accurate information from the Asian gambling markets, where most fixers place their bets even when fixing matches in other parts of the world.
They also have difficultly getting bookmakers to share who is placing the bets. This is key to really understanding whether there is corruption going on.

Fixers are also intelligent. They spend a lot of time hiding their bets – just fixing the underdog team means that there will be no unexpected movement in the bets. The EWS guys – or any other gambling monitoring – cannot detect these types of fixes, unless the fixers make a series of errors (which they usually do not). 

Finally, and this is key to understanding the entire FIFA seminar, even if the EWS spots a possible corrupt match – so what? FIFA has no investigators to investigate it. Interpol has no investigators to investigate it. The sports world in general has no investigators to investigate it. No matter what dramatic headlines declare, no matter what ‘consultants’ tell you, no matter what sports executives say in solemn tones at these types of seminars – until there is an International Agency to fight sports corruption these events will be for show only.