As the twelfth season of Indian Premier League (IPL) is all set to kick-start in Chennai on Saturday, cricket and IPL buffs are an excited lot. And on the flip-side, betting gangs are also keenly awaiting the start, as they hope to make good money, under the impression that police will not be able to concentrate on their activity, as they will be bogged down with election duty.
Past records indicate that Visakhapatnam is one among the cities in the State where IPL betting is organised on a very large-scale.
In the last two years, the City Task Force (CTF) police have arrested 19 bookies and from whom about ₹15 lakh has been seized. The police teams have also seized huge quantity of equipment that were used to organise betting on a large-scale, such as integrated call receiving systems and Line Mobile Phones. Even during the last Australia tour of India ODI series, the CTF busted a four-member betting gang that was functioning from an apartment at Gudlavanipalem.
With the General and Assembly elections for Andhra Pradesh scheduled for April 11, huge police force from both city and rural limits has been engaged on election duty, since the last two weeks. The police teams are preoccupied providing security to high profile candidates, checking flow of unaccounted cash and other election duties.
Sources said that taking this as an advantage, punters have been chalking out plans to make ‘hay while the sun shines’ in this IPL season.
The police are aware of this and sense that the bookies might come up with new modus operandi.
As per the police records, most of the cricket betting gangs that were caught in Visakhapatnam city, were organising it from apartments.
“Many gangs from other districts like East Godavari, West Godavari, Prakasam etc and other States come to the city and take an apartment on rent. That is where they organise betting. As per the old cases, most of the bookies we arrested, were once customers,” said a former official from City Task Force.
Bettings increased
“Even during the last IPL season, two major betting gangs were caught in a posh apartment at Kirlampudi Layout,” the officer recalled.
According to the city police, two years ago, the betting was done somewhere between ₹10,000 and ₹25,000 at the local level and beyond ₹30,000 bets were routed to bigger bookies working in major cities such as Hyderabad, Mumbai etc. But since last year, the local bookies are entertaining bets over ₹50,000.
CTF ACP, Visakhapatnam, M. Mahendra said that despite busy election schedule, their teams are on ground to check such illegal activity.
“Our enforcement teams have been monitoring such movements of gangs. Apartments and a few other regions in the rural areas will be under constant vigil,” he added.
