The first time NBA forward Jontay Porter
League rules forbid players from betting on NBA games. According to federal court documents filed a few months later, the plan was for his four non-NBA alleged co-conspirators to place proposition bets—wagers on isolated outcomes within a game—on a handful of Porter’s individual statistical categories. Prop bets, offering a wide variety of options, have become a favorite for gamblers. But they’re a particular headache for industry monitors such as US Integrity, because they’re easier to fix than wins and losses. If you can imagine it, some oddsmaker, somewhere, will let you bet on it, from who scores the first touchdown in a football game to whether the game will end with a “scoragami,” a final score never before recorded in NFL play. Pro leagues and oddsmakers are big fans of prop bets, because, says Matthew Holt, US Integrity’s co-founder and chief executive officer, they’re “the greatest engagement and customer acquisition tool we’ve ever seen in sports.” Fans are 20 times more likely to watch a sporting event if they’ve got a bet riding on it, he says, and prop bets keep them watching to the end, even in a blowout. For leagues and television networks desperately trying to hang on to viewers, prop bets are like superglue.
The most commonplace prop bets are over-unders. A gambling operator such as DraftKings will calculate pregame betting lines on, for instance, how many points an NBA player will score that night, or how many rebounds he’ll collect or how many three-pointers he’ll hit; then gamblers bet on whether that player will go over or under that number. In Porter’s case, the gamblers placed large bets on the under for his statistics in a handful of categories, because they knew something the sportsbooks and general public didn’t: Porter intended to remove himself from the game after just a few minutes of action, citing an aggravation of his eye injury. He played four minutes against the Clippers, scoring zero points, grabbing three rebounds, recording only one assist and attempting zero three-pointers, hitting the under on all four categories.
If you were watching the game on TV—and a US Integrity analyst was indeed watching, because US Integrity analysts are always watching—you wouldn’t have noticed anything amiss. Just a subpar game by a marginal player. What gave it away was the betting action. The heaviest action on prop bets, Holt says, “is almost always on a star—LeBron [James], or Kyrie [Irving] or Luka [Dončić].” But on this particular night, several bettors were wagering large sums, between $10,000 and $20,000, on multiple categories for a player even close followers of the NBA had never heard of. “That’s really weird,” Holt says. It was almost as if they knew what was going to happen. According to DraftKings, in fact, prop bets on Porter were the platform’s top NBA moneymaker on the night of Jan. 26.
In the six years since the US Supreme Court
Every state with legalized sports betting has
US Integrity has become a central nervous system for the sports gambling industry, sending and receiving signals from all of its limbs, scanning the entire organism for signs of trouble. Its headquarters is located just across the Las Vegas city limits in Henderson, Nevada, about 30 minutes by car from the Strip, in a glass building with a cactus garden atrium, as unobtrusive as the work that’s done inside. Its analysts are like private detectives, and if one of them spots an abnormality—big money being wagered on a marginal player, odds moving suddenly and inexplicably in one direction—they’ll blast out an alert to clients. “It’s very similar to the financial markets,” says Jason Van’t Hof, US Integrity’s vice president for investigations, a bullet-headed US Navy veteran who favors three-piece suits and arrived a year ago from the NFL’s security department. Before that he served as a branch chief with the US Defense Intelligence Agency’s Afghanistan Pakistan Task Force. “Things just don’t move in certain ways unless something else is going on,” he says. The company issues about 15 to 20 alerts monthly, warning clients to watch out for similar activity, as it did in the Porter case, and 60% of them result in suspensions, bans or arrests.
Legalized sports betting is still new enough that many would-be cheaters don’t realize the extent of the analytical forces arrayed against them. Many of them also aren’t very smart. Which brings us back to Porter. The Jan. 26 game put him on the industry’s radar, and the US Integrity analysts strongly suspected he was up to no good. “It seemed extremely fishy,” Holt says, “but extremely fishy doesn’t lead to prosecution.” But then Porter and his alleged co-conspirators tried again. During a March 20 game against the Sacramento Kings, Porter played just three minutes before removing himself from the game with an illness. Once again, several bettors had placed large wagers on a handful of Porter’s unders, and once again, all of them hit. The first time, Holt says, “could’ve been a big coincidence. But it’s not when it happens twice the exact same way.” Two days later the Raptors placed him on indefinite leave pending the results of a league investigation. On April 17, NBA Commissioner
“I know what I did was wrong, unlawful, and I am deeply sorry,” Porter told a federal court judge on July 10 in New York, where he pleaded guilty to charges of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. (His four alleged co-conspirators, who are facing the same charges, haven’t yet entered pleas.) Before the 2023-24 NBA season, he signed a one-year contract worth over $2 million. Now he’s awaiting sentencing for a crime that could keep him in prison for up to 20 years.
The Supreme Court’s repeal of the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (Paspa) in 2018 was the starting gun for what’s become a nationwide stampede of legalized gambling. But by then it already seemed inevitable. “Some of those states were ready to go as soon as that decision was made,” says Brad Hostetter, deputy commissioner for policy and institutional services at the NCAA’s Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC). “New Jersey was ready the next day, basically.” The true turning point, though, can be traced back to a precise day four years earlier: Nov. 13, 2014, when Silver published an opinion piece in the New York Times arguing that sports gambling should be legalized. “I believe we need a different approach,” he wrote. “Times have changed.”
It was a radical shift from Silver’s predecessor, David Stern, who just two years earlier had argued that a New Jersey bill to legalize sports gambling would cause “irreparable harm” to the NBA and other pro sports. Silver framed his case from a defensive posture. As John Holden, an associate professor at Indiana University and an expert on the sports gaming industry, describes it, Silver was saying aloud what all the major pro commissioners had already decided in private: “The writing’s on the wall. We’ve got an opportunity to get ahead of this.” But they could also see the dollar signs. If licensed oddsmakers were about to make big-time money enabling people to bet on their games, they wanted their cut.
Holt, a two-decade veteran of Nevada’s regulated gaming industry, saw the writing on the wall, too. He’d moved to Las Vegas after college and got a job at an odds and sports data aggregation firm—an early model for US Integrity, which he started with Scott Sadin just a few months before the Paspa ruling. He knew pro leagues and college conferences would be taking a collective deep breath, wondering how they’d protect their sports from corruption. “I was certainly not happy about it,” says William King, associate commissioner for legal affairs and compliance at the Southeastern Conference, where the mania for football rivals that of the NFL. “We were really starting from scratch, and it fell in my lap to figure out, ‘OK, what now?’ We knew we needed to get some outside help and really had no idea where to start.”
US Integrity quickly became a valued interlocutor for sectors of the sports world that had avoided one another prior to Paspa’s repeal as if they were rival street gangs. “There was no communication between the leagues and the sportsbook operators,” says Ross Anderson, US Integrity’s senior vice president for partnerships. “They didn’t talk. The sports leagues had their heads buried in the sand. The operators were always trying to reach out to them, but they weren’t picking up the phone.” They all answer it now. MLB, the NFL, NBA and NHL now have lucrative partnerships with the top sportsbook operators, but they still tiptoe around them. An executive at MLB, who asked to remain anonymous because sports gambling remains a sensitive subject, shared an example involving the All-Star Game in 2022: The league had introduced a new rule that in the event of a tie game after nine innings, the outcome would be decided by a Home Run Derby-style competition, and the sportsbooks needed clarity on how it would work in order to establish betting lines. But rather than call MLB, they called US Integrity so the company could get the explanation and distribute it across the industry.
The oddsmakers, meanwhile, weren’t so keen at first on having to engage—and share proprietary data—with integrity monitors, especially since US Integrity’s first-mover advantage had earned it a vise grip on the business, which includes competitors such as
Many of US Integrity’s clients are nascent organizations such as the American Cornhole League and Backyard Brawl Extreme Fighting Series, a bare-knuckle fighting upstart that’s a pro version of what drunk bros do outside bars. These businesses know, given the multiplier effect of gambling on fan engagement, how essential sports betting is for their survival. But the process of getting licensed is painstaking. Often, the leadership of these leagues has viewed a cut of sports betting action as a quick money spigot only to discover it’ll take years to turn on and cost nearly as much as it gushes out. BYB Extreme has been chipping away for nine months but has jurisdictional approval in only seven states and just one betting partner, ESPN Bet. “It’s a total future play,” says AJ Kaplan, US Integrity’s manager of business development. And any kind of scandal along the way can be fatal. “You’re not a league like the NFL or the NBA that can take a bad PR hit. Your emerging league won’t make it.”
US Integrity’s cornerstone monitoring product is a dashboard that displays data in real time, including how many bets have been placed on a particular sporting event, its total handle, the movement of betting lines over time and the amount of money being wagered with a particular operator, as well as individual bets. The standard annual fee for dashboard access is $15,000 for the first jurisdiction and $5,000 for each additional one, so the price tag for an oddsmaker that operates in, say, 20 states will be about $110,000 per year. Another core product is proprietary software called ProhiBet, which gives oddsmakers encrypted access to league- and conference-supplied lists of prohibited bettors—athletes, coaches, team employees and league officials who, because of their proximity to their sport, are forbidden from betting on it. If an NFL player, for instance, tries to go on FanDuel and place a bet on an NFL game, ProhiBet will automatically block his account and issue an alert to the league and the sportsbook. The monthly cost can be as high as $5,000, depending on the client’s size and the length of its prohibited bettor list.
Most irregularities that pop up on the dashboard are innocent anomalies. But US Integrity’s analysts will spring into action anyway, scouring news outlets and social media for public information that might explain a sudden line shift, such as a last-minute injury, a trade in the works or a change in the weather forecast. They’ll also watch the event with an eye for peculiar on-field behavior. If it’s a basketball game, says Calvin Seago, US Integrity’s director of analytics, “I start looking at things like pace of play, shot selection. Maybe every time up the floor [the point guard] is spending eight seconds in the backcourt before going into an offensive formation”—a possible indicator that the player is trying to hold down his or her team’s point total. Seago has been with the company nearly three years, and he remembers the way his heart raced the first time he spotted something amiss. (He won’t say what it was.) Even now he gets a shot of adrenaline every time. It makes him feel like a sleuth cracking a case.
A true story from the US Integrity files: About a year ago, a boxing trainer walked into the Hard Rock Hotel at Universal Orlando carrying a duffel bag filled with $500,000. He tried to bet all of it on a single fight. That was red flag No. 1. Red flag No. 2: The favorite in the bout was his own fighter—he’d entered the hotel with members of the fighter’s entourage and worn gear with the fighter’s name on it. “He wasn’t even hiding the fact of who he was,” Holt says. These were already enough red flags to get Hard Rock’s attention, but there was yet another: The fighter was a knockout artist who’d flattened all seven of his opponents so far before the end of the third round, yet the trainer wanted to wager that this fight would last longer than the betting line, which was 5.5 rounds. Hard Rock’s sportsbook issued a ticket for $100,000—the most it would accept on a wager of this sort—which triggered an alert through ProhiBet because, of course, the trainer was on the fight’s prohibited bettor list. The book eventually canceled the bet, kept the $100,000 and banned the trainer from its network of casinos. (He wasn’t charged with a crime because of state jurisdictional issues around Native American-run casinos.)
“We catch all of these folks,” Holt says, “and everyone goes, ‘Oh, wow, the system’s working, and you guys are catching everyone.’ Well, yeah, we catch America’s dumbest criminals.” The problem for the industry, and US Integrity in particular, is the safety net still has gaping holes. The states all have different rules, the oddsmakers share only information they’re required to, and prop betting is expanding off the field and into corners of the sports world that are almost impossible to track. “It’s a race to the bottom,” Holt says. As more operators swarm into the legal betting space, “they think that the more options [they] offer in the menu”—scoragamis, etc.—“the more competitive advantage [they] have.” Even Holt wishes they’d rein it in. But sportsbooks don’t like being told not to offer a particular prop bet. “They get mad,” he says. All US Integrity can do is urge them to put guardrails in place. “Sometimes they listen.”
What alarms integrity monitors the most is college sports. The roster of events is enormous, many schools and conferences are too small to afford sufficient protections, and the athletes are particularly vulnerable because they tend to be naive, cash-strapped and underinformed about rules. The ACC’s Hostetter, for one, wishes college sports were exempt from legal betting, “at least at the prop-betting level.” Even with those factors, in-game malfeasance is actually quite rare. A recent study from the Brussels-based International Betting Integrity Association—which is expanding into the US, where it will compete with US Integrity—examined 650,000 collegiate-level sporting events worldwide. It concluded that 99.96% unfolded with “no suspicious betting,” says Matt Fowler, IBIA’s head of global operations. But that’s still about 260 suspicious cases per year—just at the college level.
And that’s the behavior we know about. One fresh anxiety in the US is the rapid expansion of the so-called transfer portal, the process by which college athletes switch schools. Because gamblers can bet on anything now, you can also bet on where, say, a disgruntled University of Alabama football player is going to play next. Consider how many friends, family members, coaches, boosters and hangers-on could have access to that inside information. How can integrity services and government regulators keep tabs? The answer is simple and sobering: They can’t. Even trickier, how do you stop people from sharing inside info when they often don’t realize they’re doing it?
Zoe Thiros, US Integrity’s most recent hire, is a business development coordinator fresh out of Gonzaga University, where she was a two-time All-Conference volleyball player. She once got a direct message on social media from someone she didn’t know who asked her about a minor knee injury. Was she going to play in Thursday night’s match? It seemed friendly enough. She replied that she’d be fine, assuming it was just a fan. “Spokane loves their sports,” she says now. This was shortly after the repeal of Paspa, and at that point she didn’t know anything about sports betting, “because I’m not supposed to know.” Only later did she realize she might’ve inadvertently forked over information that gamblers could use to their advantage. “They could go, ‘Oh, Zoe’s hurt, she’s the starting outside hitter—I’m going to bet that she’s not going to have 20 kills that night.’ ” An innocent mistake like that could cost a college athlete their eligibility and end their career. “You’re eating next to these people, in dorms next to these people, in class next to these people,” Hostetter says, “and all of a sudden people are looking at that ankle brace you’re wearing a little differently than they did before.”
The bulk of Thiros’ job is visiting campuses and educating athletes on how to be vigilant about things that never crossed her mind during her career. Athlete education, in fact, is among US Integrity’s most lucrative product offerings. But Indiana University’s Holder says the schools themselves aren’t doing nearly enough. And Hostetter concedes that another growing headache for athletic departments—the dawn of the NIL era in the summer of 2021, permitting college athletes to profit off their name, image and likeness—has distracted them. “It kind of subsumed the gambling piece of this,” he says.
The unfettered rise of prop bets in college sports has introduced another danger for athletes: bullying and threats from gamblers who lose money and want someone to blame for it. During the men’s NCAA basketball tournament this spring, a walk-on senior for No. 1 seed Purdue University named Carson Barrett, an adored teammate who’d played 21 minutes all season, got his first and only taste of March Madness action in the waning seconds of a first-round blowout against Grambling State. He’d put off surgery for a meniscus tear in his knee on the remote chance he’d be called in for mop-up duty in a lopsided victory just like this. And with 37 seconds left in the game, he hit a three-pointer to put the Boilermakers up by 28. The Purdue bench went berserk. It was the highlight of his career. It also covered the point spread for the game—Purdue had been favored by 27. Barrett’s seemingly inconsequential shot flipped millions of dollars in betting action, turning countless winners into sudden losers.
By the time he got back to the locker room, his DMs were flooded with hatred and violent threats. “Kill yourself for taking that 3 you f-ing worthless loser,” one person wrote. “Slit your f-ing throat you f-ing f– that was completely uncalled for. I hope you f-ing kill yourself.” Professionals in all corners of the sports gambling business—the regulators, the integrity monitors, the conference executives, even the oddsmakers—admit this kind of behavior has become commonplace. “I’ve heard stories of online harassment that really make me shudder,” Hostetter says.
US Integrity recently unveiled a free software product called Athlete Alert that enables collegiate and pro players to report such abuse anonymously to state regulatory agencies, who can investigate and potentially revoke the perpetrator’s legal right to gamble. But it’s a Band-Aid on a gushing wound, a conscience cleanser akin to the “help for problem gamblers” referral information tacked onto the end of FanDuel ads. Regulators can’t use Athlete Alert without legislative approval, and so far only two states, Ohio and West Virginia, have taken the necessary step. Lawmakers have lots of other priorities, after all, and there’s not much lobbying money in protecting athletes from unconscionable abuse. Pros are increasingly subjected to it, too, and it’ll only get worse as more athletic venues add on-site sportsbooks, allowing fans to gamble on action unfolding right in front of them. The only way to stop it is for businesses to turn away paying customers, and let’s get real—that’s not how things are done in America. US Integrity’s job is to catch the cheaters, but its toughest job may be protecting the legal sports gambling industry from itself.
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Reyhan Harmanci
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