Athletes have to be cautious about what they’re betting on, as a bet on anything not officially sanctioned by the league can lead to suspension. The league’s integrity team is working to ensure that fans are able to place responsible wagers, which has included beefing up in-house technology, deploying security personnel and partnering with integrity firms to monitor violations.

The FA’s rules also ban individuals from advertising or promoting any football betting activity in which they are banned under its regulations. The ban covers anyone associated with a club in the men’s or women’s league systems, match officials at FA Level 4 and below and those involved in the administration of the game. The ban also extends to offering or accepting inside information that could be used for gambling purposes and failing to report any attempted or actual breach of the code.

Betting partnerships are a common method of circumventing these prohibitions. Individuals in a betting partnership will hand over their account to a group of professional gamblers. These groups, or syndicates, use what’s called a bot to input bets into hundreds of accounts at the same time. They’ll give the bot instructions such as a line with specific prices and the bot will automatically input those bets into all the accounts in real time.

This is why you don’t hear much about these groups publicly begging for accounts from players. The space is cutthroat and reputation based, which means a group that openly grovels for accounts is probably going to get shut down pretty quickly.