MW is Short Sportradar Group AG (SRAD US)
We are short Sportradar Group AG.
At the ICE 2026 gaming conference in Barcelona, our investigators posed as operators of a startup sportsbook. We told SRAD’s sales team — repeatedly and explicitly — that our target markets were Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, and China. Every one of these countries bans online gambling. Not one SRAD salesperson told us no. Instead, an Asia-focused sales executive walked us through product offerings tailored to each illegal market, bragged that SRAD “serves everyone,” and offered to introduce us to the Yabo Group — China’s largest illegal gambling operator, whose Cambodian call centers are staffed by trafficked and enslaved workers. He warned us that Yabo’s people didn’t attend ICE because “they would be hunted down.” Then he offered to make the introduction anyway. This is who SRAD is.
SRAD is the world’s largest sports data and integrity company. Its CEO, Carsten Koerl, has compared it to the FBI of gambling. On the Q3 2025 earnings call, he described a “4-level” KYC process and claimed the company monitors illegal market activity “very closely.” We find this claim to be a lie — contradicted not only by our undercover investigation but by SRAD’s own website code, by the testimony of fifteen current and former employees we interviewed, and by the exposed infrastructure of a business model that depends on illegal operators to survive.
Unlike companies that simply sell software, SRAD has reams of data on its customers and their customers’ customers — IP addresses, time zones, language settings, device configurations, mouse movements, even the sites through which bettors arrive. It collects 500+ data points per match. It retains user data for three years. SRAD knows where the bets are coming from. It has always known.
Our research finds that SRAD has actively aided and abetted illegal gambling across the world’s black and grey markets — not as an accident or an oversight, but as a business strategy. We estimate that illegal operators today deliver approximately 20–40% of total revenues. Using two proprietary code-analysis methodologies developed with cybersecurity experts, supplemented by extensive interviews with former SRAD sales executives, we identified nearly 50 companies as current or recent SRAD clients and collaborators who are operating in illegal markets. These include organized crime-linked 1xBet and FonBet in Russia, Cambodian modern-slavery-linked 8xBet, OKVIP, and SBOBet in Southeast Asia, and the infamous Yabo Group in China. SRAD previously denied supplying 8xBet. We found its Client ID in 8xBet’s source code.
SRAD’s CEO likes to call his company the FBI of gambling. The FBI does not offer to introduce informants to human traffickers at trade shows.
Download the Appendix containing supporting documentation for the this report here.
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