{"id":237994,"date":"2025-10-24T16:42:07","date_gmt":"2025-10-24T16:42:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/237994\/"},"modified":"2025-10-24T16:42:07","modified_gmt":"2025-10-24T16:42:07","slug":"nba-betting-scandal-shows-danger-of-blackmail-in-match-rigging","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/237994\/","title":{"rendered":"NBA Betting Scandal Shows Danger of Blackmail in Match Rigging"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tThis column originally ran in Club Sportico, our more casual bi-weekly newsletter. Sign up here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\n\tBy now you\u2019ve likely read a number of takes on the juicy NBA<\/a> gambling scandal.<\/p>\n

\n\tA journeyman point guard and two NBA coaches were accused Thursday by the FBI of conspiring to rig parts of NBA games for profit. They weren\u2019t throwing games, per se, but sharing inside information and conspiring to fix wagers on individual player stats.<\/p>\n

\n\tIt\u2019s just the latest in a string of similar scandals that have snared active athletes in many sports\u2014including college basketball, college football, college baseball, NBA, NFL<\/a> and MLB\u2014and it\u2019s a nightmare for Adam Silver and the rest of the NBA. That said, I\u2019ve been covering the growing sports betting<\/a> industry for more than a decade, and I think many journalists and fans still misunderstand the biggest risk.<\/p>\n

\n\tIf I\u2019m the NBA, or any other major league for that matter, I\u2019m not worried about more players thinking they can get away with micro match-fixing. I\u2019m worried instead about the athletes forced into it via blackmail. Let me explain.<\/p>\n

\n\tSportsbooks exist to separate bettors from their money. And over the past few decades, the smart operators realized that if you only bet on the outcome of a game, you can only lose your money once. To speed up the process, sportsbooks developed a whole new suite of betting options, including in-game wagers and bets on specific players and specific stats. You can now wager on whether the first pitch of the seventh inning will be a ball or a strike, or whether LeBron James will score 10 points in the first quarter.<\/p>\n

\n\tOn its face, those markets seem extremely easy for athletes to fix. Just throw one pitch in the dirt. Miss a couple early shots. Who\u2019s going to know?<\/p>\n

\n\tThe truth, however, is that this is really easy to detect. Sportsbooks and gaming regulators employ the services of integrity monitors who collect data on millions of daily wagers and search for any sort of suspicious activity. If a new account opens and immediately bets on a single player micro-market, that\u2019s suspicious. If a single account seems abnormally good at predicting the outcome of a single player\u2019s games, that\u2019s suspicious. If a player who usually receives minimal betting volume suddenly sees a surge in wagers on one side, that\u2019s suspicious.<\/p>\n

\n\tThese monitors also have insight into some of the grey and black market. They\u2019re good at what they do. Small illegal bookies can sometimes spot this fraud even faster.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tIt\u2019s taken a while for athletes to catch up to the sophistication of this surveillance. In 2019, Arizona Cardinals safety Josh Shaw became one of the first NFL players suspended for wagering legally on his own team\u2019s games. How was he caught? When he filled out the intake form for Caesars rewards, he wrote \u201cprofessional football player\u201d as his occupation. Athletes now know to not do that.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe next phase of pro athlete betting scandals were what I\u2019d put in the category of \u2018rules confusion.\u2019 In 2023, for example, Tennessee Titans tackle Nicholas Petit-Frere was suspended six games for violating the league\u2019s gambling rules. Petite-Frere wasn\u2019t betting on NFL games, but he was wagering on other sports from the Titans\u2019 practice facility, and that\u2019s not allowed. In response, leagues and teams increased education efforts around their gambling bylaws, and by now, I\u2019d imagine most pros understand the ground rules.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tIntegrity monitoring is the next major lesson to learn, and there\u2019s clearly still confusion. In July, MLB announced that Cleveland Guardians pitcher Luis Ortiz was placed on paid leave amid a gambling investigation. He was identified because a firm called IC360 noticed a suspicious pattern on wagers from two of his starts. More specifically, the gamblers had placed large bets that Ortiz would throw a ball on the first pitch of the second inning in a June 15 game against the Mariners, and the first pitch of the third inning of a June 27 game against the Cardinals. In both instances, Ortiz threw pitches way outside the strike zone.<\/p>\n

\n\tFor a long time, it looked like Jontay Porter<\/a> fit neatly into this narrative. A fringe NBA player since 2020, Porter became a household name last year when he was suspended\u2014then banned for life\u2014for gambling on basketball. There were multiple instances, but the one that drew the most attention was a March 20 game against the Kings, when Porter allegedly told gamblers that he would feign an illness and leave the game early. His accomplices placed an $80,000 parlay on Porter failing to hit multiple statistical targets. The bet would have won $1.1 million, but it was so irregular that when it was flagged, DraftKings froze the account and refused to pay the winnings.<\/p>\n

\n\tPorter\u2019s story was viewed largely as a cautionary tale of a corrupt athlete\u2026 until this week, when the FBI dropped news of a much wider NBA betting scandal that shed light on Porter\u2019s possible motivations.<\/p>\n

\n\tThere\u2019s a whole lot in these new allegations\u2014it\u2019s actually two cases, one about basketball and an even crazier o<\/a>ne<\/a> about rigged poker\u2014but Porter stuck out to me. During that March 20 game, according to the feds, Porter was coerced<\/a> into rigging games by others who threatened him due to his pre-existing gambling debts.<\/p>\n

\n\tThis is the thing that worries me if I\u2019m the NBA. Players will eventually learn that gaming these micro-bets is not worth the risk. Soon they\u2019ll stop trying. But bad people will never lose the desire to make a quick dollar via fixed wagers. And pressuring an athlete into helping is a pretty easy way to gain an edge.<\/p>\n

\n\tAn employee at one of the bigger integrity monitors once walked me through how this typically happens overseas. Across Europe, soccer players are routinely groomed into gambling accomplices by cons who follow a relatively consistent playbook. They befriend athletes and once in the inner circle, threaten to expose stars if they\u2019re not willing to share a little info. Once an athlete shares a nugget or two on a teammate\u2019s injury or a coach\u2019s scheme, the blackmail escalates. Athletes are told they have two choices: 1) help rig markets, or 2) be exposed as a cheat. It\u2019s one big game of leverage. \u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThis is the exact scenario laid out in a 2006 memo<\/a> that the FBI published on its website titled, Don\u2019t Bet On It: Advice to Athletes on Sports Gambling. In it, the assistant chief of the bureau\u2019s transnational criminal enterprises section says: \u201cMobsters never consider it a one-time deal\u2026 They will probably blackmail you to keep you participating in their schemes.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tSadly, there\u2019s only so much education that can help here. \u201cBe careful who you let in your inner circle\u201d might be the one lesson professional athletes will collectively never learn. And we, as a result, will collectively never be free from these bet-rigging scandals.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This column originally ran in Club Sportico, our more casual bi-weekly newsletter. Sign up here. By now you\u2019ve…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":237995,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[557],"tags":[64,63,141134,590,593,85,23371],"class_list":["post-237994","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nba","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-jontay-porter","tag-nba","tag-nfl","tag-sports","tag-sports-betting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237994","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=237994"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237994\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/237995"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=237994"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=237994"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=237994"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}