On a Monday evening in November 1997 Frank Lampard had just struck an equaliser for West Ham United against Crystal Palace when the floodlights at Upton Park failed, plunging the ground into darkness and forcing the abandonment of the game.

As football fans in east London cursed their luck, 6,500 miles away in Malaysia members of an Asian betting syndicate celebrated a six-figure payout.

A month later the syndicate – who had "arranged" for the lights to go out – repeated their scam during a Wimbledon vs Arsenal game. But, when they tried for a third time, at a Charlton vs Liverpool match, their plan was foiled. The security guard who had been bribed to trip the electrics using a remote control told a colleague of the plan and he alerted the police. Four men – two Malaysians, a Chinese man and Roger Firth, the Charlton security supervisor – were subsequently jailed for between 18 months and four years.

The scam was the first and so far only time that an Asian betting syndicate has been proven to have successfully infiltrated a British sporting event. But, as Sunday's News of the World cricket story suggested, sport in the UK is by no means out of the reach of crooked betting stings which have their roots in the Far East.

The three no-balls which the paper's reporter was given advance knowledge of would have been useless information to a British punter, who would be unable to place such a bet in a UK betting shop. In Asia, however, punters can place money on "spot bets" which predict the outcome of the minutiae of a game.

Similarly the floodlight failure scam was only of use to those placing bets in the illegal Asian betting markets. Bookmakers there pay out on the result as it stands if matches are abandoned during the second half of a game. British bookies simply void the bet.

But suspicious betting is by no means unique to Asian markets or football. In snooker a September 2008 match between Peter Ebdon and Liang Wenbo saw huge money being placed on the unfancied Wenbo to win 5-0, a scoreline he eventually achieved. And last year a low-key Wimbledon tennis match was the subject of complaints after a surge of bets predicted, correctly, that the favourite, Jürgen Melzer, would win 3-0.

But while the bookmakers report the cases, industry insiders say that their attempts to weed out cheats are frustrated by the GC and the police. In 2007 an offence of cheating in betting was created to help prosecute offenders, but in the three years since the GC has not brought a single prosecution in relation to sport.

drive from www.independent.co.uk