The Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), one of the world’s most prominent Mixed Martial Arts promotions, has doubled down on its efforts to restrict unauthorized betting conducted by athletes and insiders. To this end, the UFC has teamed up with ProhiBet, a service that specializes in monitoring for wagers placed by coaches, athletes, employees, and competition officials, or in this case the UFC, who are prohibited from participating in such types of activating.
ProhiBet is a comprehensive monitoring solution that will ensure and protect the integrity of individual competitions by deploying its advanced algorithms and putting in place an early notification system.
The partnership is a direct response to fears that the UFC was allowing too much leeway to its fighters who were said to be betting on their own fights– which is usually prohibited among other top competitions such as the NBA, NFL, and MLS, and such instances have been historically treated very strictly.
The UFC has caved to pressure to ensure that its fights are free of manipulation as well, as the promotion is interested in having its fights featured by sportsbooks, which drives viewership and overall results.
Commenting on this new development, UFC EVP & General Counsel Riché T. McKnight welcomed the opportunity to see the UFC take this step in what it considers to be the right direction, as it seeks to embrace regulation and compliance, and promote safety and fairness in the sport.
"Our collaboration with ProhiBet is another step towards strengthening our integrity controls by helping us to enforce our anti-gambling policy and support the integrity of our sport," T. McKnight added.
ProhiBet Managing Director Matt Heap has also welcomed this new opportunity with the UFC and said that the encrypted data transfer system used by his company will definitely help the UFC enhance the transparency and trustworthiness of all sports betting activities.
ProhiBet, just like the UFC, is committed to further helping sports organizations and stakeholders in the sports betting industry to clear up sports from manipulation. ProhiBet is a joint venture between Odds on Compliance and US Integrity, two companies that have become trailblazers in sports and betting integrity.
The latest partnership is also a natural continuation of UFC’s previous efforts in this direction, as the promotion appointed US Integrity as its Official betting Integrity Service a few months ago.
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