Spain's gambling and sport regulators unite at CONFAD against match-fixing threats
Spain’s Gambling Regulatory Authority, DGOJ, chaired the plenary session of the National Commission against the Manipulation of Sporting Competitions and Betting Fraud, CONFAD, where participants examined minors’ access to online gambling, the current state of their SIGMA international alert system, and emerging market trends. The session, held on June in Madrid, brought together public authorities, law enforcement agencies, sports federations and industry operators with a shared objective: safeguarding sporting integrity from betting-related corruption.
Gambling and sports regulators join forces at CONFAD against emerging threats
CONFAD is the principal national coordination body in this field; its cross-cutting composition reflects that function: the DGOJ, the Higher Sports Council, CSD, national law enforcement bodies, sports federations, athlete associations and gambling operators all work together to anticipate threats and act collectively when those threats materialise. The session was co-chaired by Mikel Arana, General Director of Gambling Regulation in Spain, and Fernando Molinero, General Director of Sport at the CSD.
Minors’ access takes centre stage
Protection of young people dominated the session, with Cecilia Pastor, Deputy General Director for Inspection at the DGOJ, presenting a detailed analysis of how underage individuals gain access to online gambling and what control mechanisms are being deployed to prevent it. This is no minor concern: early detection and an agile regulatory response are considered decisive in containing a practice that is attracting increasing attention from supervisory bodies.
The meeting also examined SIGMA, the Global Betting Market Investigation Service. Eugenio Álvarez, Deputy Director General for Regulation at the DGOJ, said the unit was designed to combat match-fixing and uphold the integrity of sport and betting markets. The SIGMA service operates as an inter-institutional collaboration network, and its reach depends substantially on the number of actors participating in its information-sharing mechanisms.
Two years of alerts and concrete results
Fernando García, Head of the Gambling Control Service within the DGOJ’s Deputy Directorate General for Inspection, reviewed the alerts recorded between 2024 and 2025 under the SIGMA service framework and presented several successful cases arising from investigations opened during that period, offering an overview of the system’s real-world performance.
In the past, the DGOJ has worked with European counterparts to identify abnormal betting trends, demonstrating its track record of cross-border enforcement in this field. The statistics demonstrate that ongoing market monitoring speeds up coordinated agency actions and makes it possible to identify anomalies more precisely.
Although CONFAD is making progress, significant challenges remain. The growing sophistication of new forms of fraud and the continued problem of underage access to gambling are shaping the organisation’s immediate agenda as it continues to reinforce its role as an institutional safeguard against corruption in sport.
This article was first published on the Spanish SiGMA News page on 5 June 2026.
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