From PornHub to pitchside: how offshore betting targets women’s cricket

Even for an industry synonymous with shady activity, this is a new low: some offshore betting companies have entered the world of pornographic content production, using it as a way to promote their brands.

A visitor to PornHub, one of the world’s most popular repositories of adult content, can find dozens of videos produced in conjunction with 1Win, a gambling operator providing in-play sports betting and casino games, but whose website shows no signs of holding a license to provide gambling services. Its ownership has been tied back to Russia. 

These pornographic films are published via the accounts of adult-film actresses, and either feature the 1Win brand in merchandise seen in the films or have the 1Win logo watermarked on them. 

Another gambling company, MostBet, is behind similar content seen on PornHub, where multiple videos featuring MostBet watermarks have titles that include the sexist phrase that “a woman’s place is in the kitchen”. 

Yet another gambling site, the Russia-founded 1xBet, is connected to the adult industry via an ambassadorial deal with the pornographic actress Eva Elfie. 

A sport promoting equality meets a darker reality

This expansion into pornographic content comes at a time when women’s sports are reaching new heights in popularity and credibility. 

In cricket, for example, which has long been known as “The Gentlemen’s Game”, there has been significant investment by the International Cricket Council (ICC) and its national counterparts in developing women’s cricket over recent decades.  

And In Australia, the national governing body speaks of an “amazing growth in girls’ participation” in recent years, with more than 5,000 all-girl teams in the country.

“To accelerate the growth of cricket for women and girls, we will build on our existing initiatives and are developing a new action plan to drive increased participation, engagement and representation of women and girls at all levels of Australian cricket,” reads their website.

Meanwhile, ticket sales for this year’s Women’s T20 World Cup, in England, have already broken records, months before the first ball will be bowled. 

This popularity is also driving social change: in cricket and other sports, women’s games are seen as a vehicle for combating sexism more broadly, as evidenced by a 2024 partnership between Cricket Australia and UNICEF to tackle gender inequality around the world.

Inevitably, this greater visibility has been mirrored in the sports betting market, where women’s cricket is now a fixture of offshore betting sites.

But is betting on women’s cricket being used to generate revenue that is used to produce pornographic material for websites accused of hosting material that promotes hatred of women?

In search for an answer to this question, Play the Game monitored the live cricket offerings of 1Win, MostBet and 1xBet across January 2026 and found that they offered opportunities to bet on women’s cricket games in competitions ranging from official international tournaments to grassroots and academy competitions.

Efforts to promote equality amid entrenched misogyny

The most high-profile of these games were qualifiers for this year’s Women’s T20 World Cup. Organised by the sport’s governing body, the ICC, the qualifiers were held in Nepal and featured teams from countries ranging from the USA to Papua New Guinea to Thailand. 

Those who viewed 1Win’s content on Pornhub and then visited the website of the gambling company may have seen real-time match data of the ICC’s qualifiers. In many cases, this data was accompanied by a livestream, which appeared to be the official broadcast stream of those matches. 

It is not clear how that match content was accessed by the gambling company, nor if it was through official channels. 

“The convergence of unregulated gambling, live betting, women’s sport, and pornography linked operators creates a perfect storm of integrity vulnerabilities,” says Catherine Ordway, an Australian lawyer and academic. 

“It perpetuates misogynistic tropes that women’s bodies - and by extension women athletes – are being made available to be abused at will.”

It also sets back the sport’s attempts to erase a culture of sexism, which, despite the advancements in women’s cricket, remains stubborn. 

“Women continue to be treated as second-class citizens with unequal access, pay and treatment,” said the chair of the commission behind 2023’s Equality in Cricket report from England, Cindy Butts.

“Women are marginalised and routinely experience sexism and misogyny. The women’s game is treated as subordinate to the men’s game, and women have little or no power, voice or influence within cricket’s decision-making structures.”

It described English cricket as still harbouring a “puerile ‘lads’ culture” and said drinking often led to situations in which women felt unsafe.

An even more recent report from Scotland found similar issues.

“If betting operators also have associations with pornography and adult entertainment, legal or otherwise, it is not only going to undermine efforts to position women’s sport as safe, inclusive, and community centred, but it potentially exposes players – especially younger or lower paid women – to predatory approaches,” says Dr. Ordway.

Play the Game approached the UK Professional Cricketers Association (PCA) for their response about gambling companies which offer cricket games for betting, whilst also sponsoring porn. However, the PCA did not respond.

Betting markets are increasing the risk of match-fixing

Play the Game’s audit of the presence of women’s cricket games on betting platforms also revealed other problems, including an increased risk of match-fixing. 

The audit showed that 1Win, MostBet, and 1xBet all offered games on national-level women’s competitions that were underway during the southern summer, such as the Women’s Super Smash in New Zealand and the Women’s National Cricket League in Australia.

1xBet  also offered multiple games from an under-19s women's competition from Thailand, plus live betting on women’s cricket from Uganda to Bhutan to the Windward Islands.

“With the popularity of WPL and with India having won the cricket world cup recently, the eyeballs on women's cricket are increasing in general, which does open it up to the betting market,” says Aahna Mehrotra, founder of Indian-based law firm AM Sports Law & Management Co. 

When a sport is featured on betting markets, this introduces inherent risks such as match-fixing, and those risks are magnified away from the main stage. 

“The risk is higher in amateur cricket,” says Steve Richardson, former ICC coordinator of Anti-Corruption Investigations for the ICC. 

Richardson points to the European Cricket League as an example from the men’s game that shows the dangers of letting the international gambling market set odds on the games involving non-professional participants. 

As Play the Game revealed back in 2021, there were issues with corruption at low-level games across Europe, with one club game attracting bets of 5 million US dollars

“These were all amateur players who soon realised they could make some money (through fixing),” says Richardson.

Richardson points out that at lower-level games, anyone can go down to the ground and approach the players, who will not have had the right education as to the risks.  

“That is the risk you run when you have these streams that are uncontrolled: there is no security.”

Dr Ordway, who is a member of the Asian Racing Federation’s Council on Anti-Illegal Betting and Related Financial Crime, called on the ICC to sever any ties with the bookmakers in question, such as ensuring their live data and odds on its games are not made available to the bookmakers. 

The threat of fixing in women’s cricket is a real one: Bangladesh international Shohaly Akhter was recently given a five-year ban for multiple breaches of the ICC Anti-Corruption Code. The breaches related to approaches to corrupt players connected to the 2023 T20 Women’s World Cup.

A report in the Daily Telegraph in May 2025 raised concerns about betting on women’s cricket in England and highlighted the minimal security at venues, which allows scouts to collect data unhindered. 

Offshore betting companies routinely offer in-play betting on games in England. For example, when Hampshire played The Blaze in the Metro Cup in the summer of 2025, the game was available for in-play betting on both 1Win and 1xBet.

As these screenshots show, English women’s games were available for inplay betting on illegal betting websites in the summer of 2025, because data was being collected from these matches.

Players face abuse from disappointed bettors

Women’s games can attract large bets. The same day as this match, a Lancashire vs Essex game was also offered by 1Win and streamed live on YouTube, where one watcher commented: “Women's matches are the only match that gives 10x return very frequently.”

Betting is often discussed in the comments section of livestreams. Comments on YouTube for another game between Somerset and Durham in that season’s Metro Cup include one viewer mentioning they lost 45k (the currency is not disclosed). 

In other sports, angry bettors who have lost money on bets have harassed players on social media. 

Last summer, the English Cricket Board (ECB) launched a survey on women’s players at the top level. The results have not been made public, but it is understood that more than 50% of players experienced harassment on social media. Play the Game asked the ECB how much of this abuse was betting-related, but did not get a response to this question.

According to Dr. Catherine Ordway, research shows that women athletes report disproportionate and sexualised abuse from bettors.

“Unregulated operators are unlikely to enforce user behaviour standards, require identity verification, or conduct moderation. This increases the likelihood of threats and coercion,” she says.
“If betting operators also have associations with pornography and adult entertainment, legal or otherwise, it is not only going to undermine efforts to position women’s sport as safe, inclusive, and community centred, but it potentially exposes players – especially younger or lower paid women – to predatory approaches,” she continues.

Anti-corruption officers trained and sent by England’s Cricket Regulator ejected more than 100 unofficial data scouts from women’s games during the 2025 season, including the T20 County Cup, which includes sides from the lowest professional level, Tier 3.

The ECB is currently procuring a new data contract. This will allow the successful company to send accredited data collectors to all domestic men’s and women’s competitions to collect live match information for betting purposes. 

This deal would also allow the appointed company to collate match data from a TV feed. Given the ubiquity of these livestreams, it is unclear quite how the ECB’s new data partner proposes to protect the exclusivity of these deals.

Unofficial competitions are feeding betting markets

Another integrity concern comes from games played in unofficial competitions. 

The number one location of 1xBet’s live cricket betting offerings is India, where unofficial competitions are taking place at venues like the Shri Krishna Cricket Academy in Sidipur, on the outskirts of Delhi with as many as six games in a day, every day of the week. 

It is known as the Agra District Women's League, a reference to a location hundreds of kilometres away, and it is a competition with little online presence outside of its semi-permant status on a small number of betting sites like 1xBet and the CricHeroes streaming service. 

It is so far outside the structures of organised cricket that teams do not change ends at the completion of an over, an occurrence that should usually happen every few minutes.

This makes it possible to stream the matches with just a single camera, set up at the southern end of the ground. Not changing ends ensures the batter will always be facing viewers (which is the standard practice for cricket broadcasts) when she receives the ball. 

Satellite imagery sheds more light on this competition’s unusual setup. Professional cricket grounds place a sight screen at either end of the field. These are large screens designed to give the batter better visibility of the ball as it is delivered. 

On the live streams from Shri Krishna, one can be seen behind the batter (left photo below). While viewers would presume another is installed behind the bowler, Google Maps reveals this is not the case (right photo below).

Therefore, the sightscreen simply acts like a prop, giving no assistance to the batter, but it gives viewers a sense of the competition being at a higher level of professionalism.

Screenshot and a satellite image showing the cricket pitch at the Shri Krishna stadium in India.

Play the Game attempted to contact the competition organisers and those involved in the games, but was unable to reach them.

The Agra District Women's League is one of dozens of competitions of questionable origin that are producing content for bookmakers like 1xBet at all hours of the day. 

As investigations by Josimar and Bellingcat have shown, there are warehouses set up across Eastern Europe to pump out live data and livestreams in sports ranging from volleyball to football to tennis. 

India is doing the same with cricket. One competition on offer on Russia-linked gambling sites produced odds around the clock, day after day. On the last day of January alone, 1xBet and 1Win both featured live odds and streams for 40 games from an indoor league.

While this and most other similar competitions are for male competitors, 1xBet and 1Win were found to be offering live odds on a women’s T10 indoor competition that operated 12-hours per day. 

“There’s plenty of appetite for women’s cricket now, and so much at a decent level that it seems like overkill to go to this level,” said an experienced cricket trader who works with a major European licensed betting operator, but was not authorised to speak publicly.

Popular cricket websites such as Cricinfo and Cricbuzz typically list vast amounts of games, but many low-level games that Play the Game found on the betting market were typically not on those sites. 

“There’s so much now on Cricinfo and Cricbuzz, and people are checking these sites for info,” said the trader. “If these games are not on there, then that tells you something.

“I don’t see how there is really any money that can be made on this unless it’s dodgy money. My guess is that this level is just there for money-laundering and other dodgy reasons.”

It remains unclear who supplies the data

Play the Game spoke to organisers of two low-level men’s competitions whose games were offered for betting on 1xBet. Neither was aware of how their games had appeared there for in-play betting, and the situation probably also applies to women’s games.

The computer code and data feeds used by 1xBet, 1Win and MostBet do not reveal the sources of their live data (in contrast to what can be found on the websites of many other bookmakers).

However, for international competitions like the Women's T20 World Cup and its qualifiers, the ICC has a deal in place with Stats Perform. 

Play the Game asked Stats Perform and the other two major data companies, Genius and Sportradar, if they were collecting and supplying data from these events to unlicensed betting companies that sponsor porn.

Sportradar confirmed it offered data from these ICC qualifiers but did not supply it to 1xBet, 1Win or Mostbet. Genius and Stats Perform did not reply