With the 2026 World Cup about to kick off, the stakes for illicit finance are high. No sport attracts more illegal betting and organized criminal manipulation than football, and the tournament offers the ideal high-volume, globally connected environment for exploitation.

The rapid growth of sports betting and a new generation of crypto-enabled prediction markets are creating fresh challenges for international financial crime enforcement. Prediction markets – platforms where users bet on the outcomes of events, usually using cryptocurrency – currently process billions of dollars per week. This year, FIFA, the World Cup organizer and governing body, has entered the market directly, with a newly launched prediction market exchange becoming an official tournament sponsor.

For criminal actors, prediction markets present three distinct opportunities. They can serve as money laundering channels, converting illicit funds into apparently legitimate winnings; they are vulnerable to insider trading; and they are exposed to result manipulation, where the underlying event itself is compromised to guarantee a payout.

Illegal betting has long served as a conduit for money laundering, competition manipulation and the exploitation of gaps between national regulatory frameworks. As a newer and less regulated form of online wagering, prediction markets present additional challenges, entering territory that existing enforcement tools were not designed to address.

According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), criminal groups are increasingly making use of cryptocurrency, e-wallets and electronic payment services to facilitate their activities. The scale and reach of football finance make it an attractive channel for these illicit flows. For the 2026 World Cup, global betting volumes are expected to exceed US$50 billion, up sharply from around US$35 billion in 2022, and growth has been particularly pronounced in emerging markets. In Brazil, consumers wager approximately US$5.1 billion each month on online betting platforms.

Alternative payment systems – methods other than cash or card transactions – create opportunities for concealment. In Kenya, for instance, mobile money is widely used for betting deposits and withdrawals, and in 2025 Safaricom, the country’s largest telecommunications provider, disclosed that it had detected money laundering through betting platforms and international money transfers.

The transactions and proceeds of illicit betting thus move through a fragmented infrastructure that complicates oversight and makes end-to-end transaction monitoring far more difficult for any single regulator or institution.

The mechanics of money laundering

Traditional betting-related money laundering is a well-established industry. Criminal proceeds are placed on a betting platform, and winnings are withdrawn as apparently legitimate income. More sophisticated schemes use networks of accounts to place offsetting bets, thereby converting criminal funds into withdrawable balances while limiting losses. Online gambling is fast, remote and frequently operates across borders, making it difficult for authorities to track transactions and apply standard anti-money laundering controls.

The challenge is compounded by regulatory inconsistencies. Activities prohibited in one jurisdiction may be legal in another, creating opportunities for operators to exploit differences between national frameworks. This has tangible consequences. In 2025, for example, the analytics firm Sportradar detected 1 116 suspicious matches worldwide, across markets with widely varying levels of regulatory oversight, with football the most severely affected. According to the UNODC, up to US$1.7 trillion is wagered on illicit betting markets annually.

Unlike traditional sportsbooks, prediction markets operate as exchanges where users take positions against each other, rather than against a bookmaker, with the platform matching orders and settling trades in cryptocurrency or cash when the result is known. Funds cross borders on blockchain-based networks outside traditional banking systems until they are converted into fiat currency.

Polymarket, the world’s largest prediction market, withdrew from the US in 2022 following regulatory pressure. It re-entered in late 2025 after restructuring its operations and receiving approval to operate as a designated contract market. Even so, most of its activity continues to flow through its unregulated international exchange – an estimated US$9 billion in April 2026, compared with US$1.3 billion on its US-regulated counterpart.

Beyond these financial figures, the identities of Polymarket’s millions of account holders are effectively invisible, posing a significant challenge for criminal investigators. Without clear identity links, tracing who ultimately controls funds moving in and out of the platform can be far more difficult than in traditional betting or banking environments.

Kalshi, the first US-regulated prediction market exchange, applies strict identity verification requirements. Yet it now operates in 140 countries, many of which lack clear legal frameworks for event contracts or prediction markets, leaving open the question of whether they should be treated as financial instruments or gambling products.

Sports betting now accounts for a large share of activity on prediction markets, and overall volumes can no longer be considered marginal. Combined monthly trading across Polymarket and Kalshi, for instance, reached an estimated US$24 billion in April 2026.

Research also suggests that wash trading – coordinated volume manipulation using clusters of anonymous accounts – amounts to roughly 25 per cent of all trading on Polymarket, rising to around 60 per cent during peak activity. Around 14 per cent of the platform’s 1.26 million active wallets show patterns consistent with this behaviour. That such analysis is possible at all reflects the platform’s blockchain-based architecture, which records all transactions publicly. The actual identities behind wallet addresses, however, are often still undisclosed.

Prediction market platforms have expanded rapidly across global jurisdictions, and many operate without local gambling or financial service licences. Their fragmented legal status creates openings for illicit actors. On crypto-based platforms, settlement flows through stablecoin-to-fiat conversion channels that may fall outside existing betting oversight or virtual asset regulation.

Endorsement and its implications

In April 2026, FIFA announced a partnership with ADI Predictstreet, a little-known subsidiary of a company linked to Abu Dhabi’s IHC investment group, licensed in Gibraltar, naming it the official prediction market platform for the World Cup. The deal, estimated to be worth around $150 million, places ADI alongside FIFA’s established global sponsors. The football governing body made sure to note that the arrangement includes a comprehensive integrity monitoring framework, involving tracking of suspicious trading and structured information sharing between the two parties.

The partnership reflects the growing mainstream acceptance of blockchain-based prediction markets operating on crypto payment networks across jurisdictions. However, FIFA’s commercial endorsement may accelerate the public adoption of platforms that regulators in countries such as India and Brazil are still struggling to classify and supervise.

The World Cup is the most immediate test case for these challenges. However, the issue extends well beyond any single event. The task for regulators is to monitor individual prediction market platforms while also tracking the wider financial infrastructure through which funds move. While efforts to protect the integrity of the game itself are underway, the payment systems and market structures surrounding it are developing faster than the frameworks meant to govern them – which will leave regulators struggling to stay onside.