PUNE: The Pimpri Chinchwad police late on Friday night arrested 33 bookies for accepting online bets on the India-England One Day International match played at Gahunje stadium.
In a joint operation, the Wakad and the Talegaon Dabhade police raided the spots near the stadium — an adjacent hill and an under-construction site — besides a hotel in Vimannagar and arrested the bookies hailing from Haryana, Delhi, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, Goa, Uttar Pradesh, Mumbai, Rajasthan as well as a few from the city.
The bookies from other states had come down to the city just before the One Day International (ODI) series started earlier this week, said a source.
The Pimpri Chinchwad commissioner of police (CP), Krishna Prakash, said, “The bookies were using high resolution cameras and binoculars to get the live feed of the match. They were spreading the information of the match before the live telecast was beamed on TV sets of viewers, taking advantage of the lag of six seconds in the live telecast. They were accepting bets from Madhya Pradesh, Haryana, Goa and other parts of the country.”
Prakash said, “The bookies were watching the match from long distance and passing on the ball-by-ball developments to different parts of the country. We shall study the data stored in the seized laptops and cellphones for further probe.”