I’ve seen a lot of players get caught recently for gambling and getting suspended or banned but how do sports organizations find out? Do they monitor player’s finances?
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Usually someone tells on them, often the person/platform they’re gambling with. All signs point to Jontay Porter being turned into the NBA by Draftkings. They didn’t like having to keep paying out to him, and they knew having a player gambling on their app was bad for their partnership with the league. Shohei Ohtani’s translator was caught when he outed himself under implied pressure from his bookie to go directly to Ohtani for money.
For the case of a basketball player recently, he was caught because the sportsbook noticed irregular betting activities.
Starting an account and putting $100 on the raptors to win outright is “normal” betting behavior.
Starting an account and putting $80,000 on a prop bet for a Raptors forward to hit the under on minutes played and points to win a million dollars is highly abnormal betting behavior. People don’t just show up and place a ton of money on odd and specific bets and win a fortune – what are the odds of that just randomly happening?
The betting activity is highly suspicious, and so the sportsbook itself investigated the activity and reported it to the NBA and the authorities for potential fraud.
The sports books are always looking out for activity that isn’t normal or costs them a lot of money. For Porter, the bets on his individual performances lost that book the most money those nights. The fact that they lost money on abnormally large bets, and he’s a very low profile player throws up major alarms. When they start looking into it, they will alert other books and the league that they are investigating irregularities. That prevents other books from getting burned and lets the league start their investigation.
The same way everyone gets caught doing wrong things, someone notices and says something. When you do fraudulent activity, everyone involved needs to not report it. Usually this is mutually beneficial for everyone, e.g. people make money and it’s fine, or the fraud is performed using online tools that can’t individually identify a person.
But it usually happens when someone that should have been quiet speaks up. Often it’s a member of the circle of friends that feels like they’re not getting paid enough or a person/entity that’s being taken advantage of (no bookmaker wants to lose). Occasionally, it’s a person outside the circle of trust that discovers what is happening and then comes forward, so that could be significant other or an accountant.
The NBA and each team also has a team of data scientists who’s entire job is to look for sports betting anomalies.
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