Bookmakers Investigating Great British Bake Off Insider Betting

The bookmakers Ladbrokes is considering suspending betting on future series of The Great British Bake Off after it launched an investigation into insider betting on the popular show.

Ladbrokes is investigating dozens of new gambling accounts created with links to BBC staff and members of the show’s production company Love Productions. According to David Williams, Ladbrokes’ Head of Media, the company began to suspect something at the start of the series and is now looking into it further.

The company is looking at 42 accounts with links to the show’s insiders that were created in a three day period just before the new series began in late august. A total of 529 suspicious bets have been placed with a potential payout of £10,000. The bookmaker has said that it will think twice about whether it will offer similar markets in the future.

Nadiya Hussain, Ian Cumming and Tamal Ray all featured in the final last Wednesday with Cumming And Hussain having won Star Baker three times and Ray earning it just once. Prior to the final airing Hussain was strong favourite to win with odds of around 1/5 while Cumming and Ray trailed at 6/1 and 8/1 respectively.

Love Productions expressed its surprise that Ladbrokes would risk taking bets on a pre-recorded show. A spokeswoman for the company said that everyone who works on the production is bound by confidentiality and that the company would take any breach of this extremely seriously.

The BBC said that it had no knowledge of the claims and it has asked The Sun newspapers, which originally broke the story, to provide them with more details.