The names of more than 70 players appear on nine leaked lists of suspected fixers who have been flagged to world tennis authorities over the past decade without being sanctioned.
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All of the players, including several Grand Slam doubles winners, were allowed to continue competing.
The investigation’s findings are based upon a cache of leaked documents, as well as information arising from a 2008 probe into match-fixing.
A group of whistleblowers inside tennis, who wanted to remain anonymous, recently passed the documents on to the BBC and Buzzfeed News.
The enquiry reportedly found betting syndicates in Russia, Northern Italy and Sicily which were making hundreds of thousands of pounds off of alleged match fixing.
A report claims that there is evidence to suggest top-level tennis players have been involved in suspected match fixing over the past decade.
Betting analyst Mark Phillips, who worked on the 2007 investigation, told the BBC there was a core group of players believed to be at the heart of the scandal.
He said: “The evidence was really strong”.
Bookmakers have told BuzzFeed News that, in many cases, when they tried to warn the Tennis Integrity Unit about suspicious matches they got no response.
Tennis officials were first alerted of the players and possible match fixing seven years ago, but all have played since without any discipline, reports Buzzfeed and the BBC.
However tennis’s integrity unit does have the power to demand all this evidence from any professional tennis player.
It’s the first time Gunn had publicly spoken about his concerns.
Four players showed particularly unusual patterns – they had lost almost all of the matches where gamblers had betted heavily on one side.
“What they did is a plastic solution which was not effective then and it’s not effective now”, Gunn said. It had said that tennis attracted more suspicious gambling activity than any other sport.
The TIU says on its website it has a zero-tolerance policy to gambling-related corruption worldwide.
The BBC and BuzzFeed News quoted Nigel Willerton, director of the TIU, as saying: “All credible information received by the TIU is analyzed, assessed, and investigated by highly experienced former law-enforcement investigators”.
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The problem of suspicious betting and match fixing is not going away.
