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Lithuim

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.


maddenallday

So he should’ve placed a bunch of 50/50 bets and other props before placing that one at least


primalmaximus

Or just not been so specific or bet so much money. Like, who bets $80,000 on a very specific scenario?


maddenallday

I mean maybe if he put 80k on a bunch of other very specific (but 50/50 scenarios), they wouldn’t have detected the one where he cheated


Jimbo5204

If the book has to payout over a million dollars they are gonna look into that regardless of other bets


maddenallday

Yeah very fair


PoopinThaTurd

Yeah but at the same time the more you’re betting on stuff you’re not cheating on, the more you’re risking cutting into your (ill-gotten) winnings and taking actual losses. And at that point why even risk cheating if you’re just gonna break even or worse


maddenallday

Yeah but say he puts 80k over and over on 50/50 scenarios. In the long run, he should break even-ish. Let’s say 10% vig, so at the end of it, he’s down like 80k. Even be generous and say he’s down 160k. Then he places one more bet with a guaranteed 1.1 mill win and walks away. You cut into it a little, but at least you (probably) won’t get caught?


twoManx

They'll get caught. Sportsbooks and other licensed gambling establishments have the resources, and know-how, to identify cheaters. Like billions, if not trillions, of data points shared across the industry to detect anomalies.


9erInLKN

Or in this case to make 20k total when you get paid 3.3 million


Alex_butler

Most books won’t even take that amount of action on a given bet unless you’ve proven to be a very bad bettor or a celebrity pushing their product. So it’s incredibly suspect if you try to open an account and put that much on a niche bet


Jimbo5204

If the book has to payout over a million dollars they are gonna look into that regardless of other bets


skaliton

r/wallstreetbets but even then it is going to be investigated for obcious reasons


miaast

Like the people who bet on gamestop and got big payouts were investigated. Governments, organizations, companies etc don't like losing money and will look in to ways to fuck you over especially when you make it as obvious as this guy did.


[deleted]

Adam Sandler over and over again in Uncut Gems.


screech_owl_kachina

Time travelers


Lithuim

The thing about betting odds is that they favor the house. If you win a bunch of money over and over the sportsbook will always suspect you’re up to something even if you occasionally lose. It’s statistically improbable to keep winning and they don’t generally offer many truly 50/50 bets. The fact that Ippei *lost* a fortune is what’s probably saving Shohei Ohtani from any additional heat - that’s the expected outcome of a degenerate gambler that doesn’t have any insider information.


CptBartender

>The thing about betting odds is that they favor the house. That's true in casinos, where outcomes are truly random. With sports betting, it's a matter of predicting outcome. Bookies do their best to predict the odds accurately, but theoretically you can do a better job than them, *possibly* (but not necessarily) giving you slightly favorable odds in the long run. There's also a thing called '*surebet*', where you find different bookies who give slightly different odds for a game, and bet in such a way that overall you have a marginal gain regardless of the outcome.


Z3130

The books aren’t actually trying to predict the outcome - they’re setting the line to try and balance the payout on both sides of the line. If they can acheive that, they don’t risk any actual loss and they have the guaranteed profit of the vig. So really you need to be better than the collective wisdom of everyone else betting, which is definitely achievable if you have more knowledge than they do.


T-T-N

Minus the house edge


T-T-N

Especially when you have an abnormally good record for under with a particular bench player


maddenallday

Even still, say he takes 60/40 house odds bets over and over and goes down like 200-300k. Then wins one (seemingly improbable) 1.1 million dollar bet (which was guaranteed) and walks away up 900k or so. Would that still raise red flags? This strikes me as something that could actually happen. A beginner just gets lucky after some initial losses and then walks away (or at least that’s how it might look to the books).


mindless900

Except the US government takes about 50% of those winnings, so you are really walking away with $450K in your scenario. Doesn't make sense to risk a career that makes more than that annually for a one time payout that will raise flags.


0100001101110111

It’s still not hard to detect. If someone is betting on 60/40 outcomes then suddenly bets on a very specific, high odds outcome and wins big they’d probably still look at it. And then it would be pretty easy to tie back to a player unless you were really good at obfuscating where the funds came and went.


mgt69

also $80k on a prop bet raises major questions. most people don’t realize you cant just go to vegas (or online) and place semi-large bets. if sports books don’t know you they will immediately start asking questions (and not take your bet). and they will alert all other books.


DeapVally

They never should have placed such a specific bet in the first place. Certainly not for any more than chump change, at any rate. A few bucks on something like that is a wild punt, that's sometimes fun to do, so people do it. Thousands of dollars though? Yeah. That's majorly sus. Legit gamblers don't do that.


xphizio

Sportsbooks use super computing to determine lines. Chances are they have software to detect the irregular "patterns" too no matter what you do.


hungry4pie

If he’s engaged in insider betting, then chances are he’s a full blown gambling addict. In which case his reasoning skills might not be with him (ie he might be Stephen Hawking smart, but he can do do stupid shit). Add to that, if he is a gambling addict he might owe a lot of money to some dangerous people and in sheer desperation would make those bets.


flyingcircusdog

He should've at least placed some high wagers on 50/50 bets first to establish himself as a big spender. After a few months, then he can expand.


greenwizardneedsfood

It’s amazing how terrible he was at selling it. Like…you can underperform without exiting the game after 3 minutes and being ridiculously suspicious


Likemypups

Yeah, and for a smart guy like him ....


juancuneo

Looking for unusual, timely trades is also how the SEC catches insider trading. After a big deal is announced they send the names associated with weird trades to both sides law firms and ask if there is any relation to these people.


wellboys

Yep, I work in financial services and there's an automated compliance thing connected to my brokerage accounts that monitors tickers we've researched for any activity at all. If youre a known associate of mine its not plugged into your account, but if you suddenly make a shitload of money off a very well-timed trade, somebody is gonna start looking at it, and its trivial to cross-reference that against my company's restricted trading list. If i wasnt actually even the tipper/there wasnt one and my cousin or whoever just got lucky? Tough shit for me, even the appearance of impropriety is enough to lose my job. Unless you're in congress, insider trading isn't easy, and probably not worth it. To relate it back to OP, now that sportsbetting is legal in many US jurisdictions via legitimate platforms, I'd wager you're much more likely to get busted gambling as a pro athlete. This guy probably wasn't handing some dude licking his pencil and filling in a ledger in a smoke-filled bar a grocery bag with $80 000 in it.


ShouldersofGiants127

Jesus Christ, I always wonder why criminals are almost never smart enough to move in a way that doesn’t blow up their spot. Like honestly I’m a little upset this guy is getting a lifetime ban while all these sports leagues back these gambling outlets now but after reading how he was doing it I don’t care at all anymore.


Lithuim

The criminals that are smart enough to expertly cover their tracks never get discovered. The betting looks normal and the sportsbook doesn’t even realize they’ve been fleeced, they just eat the loss alongside all the other upset wins that cost them money that year.


HurricaneAlpha

Yeah the smart criminals don't get caught, hence we never hear about them. Like the opposite of survivors bias.


lobsterharmonica1667

I think its more that quite often, the only criminals who get caught are the very stupid ones


cat_prophecy

Should note here that the sportsbook only cared because they stood to lose a lot of money on the bet.


Kundrew1

Is that not obvious?


jrhooo

u/cat_prophecy This is not really true. Not for sports betting.  Zero tolerance on Stuff like this will always be aggressively investigates and enforced  The leagues and the sportbooks are making billions off their businesses The leagues need fans to keep watching sports The books need people to keep betting To protect that, they can’t allow the public to build even the slighest belief that the games are being fixed.   The money they’d lose on any one bet is nothing.  The money they’d lose if the public stopped believing in the games, that terrified them.  Also, as a bonus, even having gambling legalized was tricky, and there are still people who aren’t in favor, so they sure don’t want to allow any kind of situation that might give congress or the fed whatever to start putting them under the spotlight.  If it looks like they don’t have a way to control match fixing, the fed might try to shut it all down.   **TL;DR:** They aren’t scared of losing money on a single bettor. They’re scared of losing credibility and it killing the whole business


Lithuim

That’s why Ippei didn’t get flagged until he was millions in the hole and the bookies came to break his legs.


PM_ME_WUTEVER

> what are the odds of that just randomly happening? hmmm. maybe i'll open up a sportsbetting account and place an $80,000 bet on a player opening up a sportsbetting account and placing an $80,000 bet next season.


dammitboy42069

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.


FaultySage

I know one NFL player got suspended because they accessed the gambling site through the company wifi at the team facility. He was gambling on NBA, so he didn't think there was an issue, but the NFL policy is players cannot gamble on sports AT ALL on compaby property.


Venomglo

That one was particularly ticky tacky because it was at a hotel the team was staying in while traveling and that technically made it a team facility.


FaultySage

Nicholas Petit-Frere's own statement was that he did it at the Titan's facility. Either way, it explicitly states that gambling is prohibited during team travel.


Venomglo

Oh I meant Jameson Williams on Lions when he got caught


nighthawk252

At this point, it’s mostly the dumb people who are getting caught. Jontay Porter was caught because one of his friends attempted to place an $80,000 parlay on all his unders, which is a highly irregular bet which got flagged and was not permitted to be placed. The LSU coach got caught for giving tips because one of his buddies went to a sportsbook, tried to place a bet against LSU, and was told his intended bet was higher than the allowed maximum bet.  He argued that he should be allowed to because he knew some very important information that made him confident LSU would lose.


combat_muffin

> He argued that he should be allowed to because he knew some very important information that made him confident LSU would lose. Jesus people are stupid...


Jabbles22

Of course my bags are filled with cocaine, I can make a huge profit selling that stuff when I get home./s


smoothtrip

Louisiana


benjarmb

LSU/Patriots WR Kayshon Bouttee got caught in part because he used his actual name as his user name. https://x.com/ChadGraff/status/1750611193398440325


kicker3192

The books have hundreds of prop bets for every game, for every sport. There's a pretty common "average" to what you're gonna get for Scottie Barnes over/under bets each night. Probably, on average, fairly predictable. That'll, generally speaking, be more popular than the down-roster guys (like Porter). There may be a couple thousand on either side of a normal prop line for someone like Jontay. But when that gets ten-folded, it probably makes you at least dig in and say "why is this one specific prop bet so heavy on a random night". And what Sportsbooks are really good at is not losing money. So if they get pounded on a line AND there's something weird that happens (dude plays 4 minutes and exits the game) that's going to get the risk management people salivating over the ability to find a loophole / exit strategy to not pay out some random 10x bet. (note: if they were simply making $100 prop bets on his o/u, he's probably still playing basketball. The volume and greed gets you caught)


atrain82187

Casinos and books track EVERYTHING. They are constantly looking for trends, irregularities, etc. They are trying to make money, so knowing where money is coming from, going out to, etc, is important. When the 9th man on the team, who maybe had 100$ in bets involving him all season, suddenly gets 10s of thousands of dollars of bets on him, all on an under, which hits because the player leaves the game early because he was "hurt" its gonna stand out. Now if someone like LeBron had someone bet 500$ on his under for points and checked out earlywith an injury, it probably wouldn't be flagged, but LeBron has much more to lose than the guy in Toronto by doing it.


Antman013

It's not just the Sportsbooks or casinos doing the tracking. There are LEAGUES that will monitor betting action looking for anomalies that indicate whether match fixing is taking place. If you want to read a great book on the subject, it's called The Fix by Declan Hill.


Twin_Spoons

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.


bouncing_bear89

The NBA and each team also has a team of data scientists who's entire job is to look for sports betting anomalies.


TEE_EN_GEE

Leagues definitely do, I haven't heard of any teams hiring people to monitor their players for wagering.


bouncing_bear89

According to [ESPN](https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/39808900/nba-eyes-raptors-jontay-porter-betting-issues) >Sports betting is monitored by dedicated personnel from each NBA team, and the league has a team of data scientists focused on sports betting anomalies and possible integrity issues and also works with third-party integrity monitors.


TEE_EN_GEE

Interesting thanks!


TEE_EN_GEE

All the apps obviously require geolocation, and several players placed bets WITHIN THE PRACTICE FACILITY of their NFL team, making it pretty obvious they were a member of the club (thus not allowed to wager). Sometimes players used their real names to sign up. And sometimes like in Porter's case, books saw irregularities in prop bets that flagged something was up. Big winners are obviously a problem for books (anyone who has any success will have pretty onerous limits placed on their accounts) so something like this especially stands out.


itsdereksmifz

They pay a company who specializes in this stuff. That company looks at line movements, player activity. All the things. I’m not sure who NBA/NFL/MLB use, but I know UFC uses Don Best Sports as their “integrity partner”


NegativeBee

In addition to suspicious behavior, as others have pointed out, sometimes athletes are dumb enough to use their own name when opening an account. For example, Kayshon Boutte (an LSU football player) opened an account with his mothers banking information but the username was “[Kayshonboutte01](https://www.nola.com/sports/lsu/former-lsu-star-kayshon-boutte-faces-sports-betting-charges/article_4f2da45a-bba6-11ee-8080-7f02daca37f7.html)”


Dangerous_Town_5198

In Iowa, our DCI traced IPs back to a dorm and then basically captured their internet traffic as I understand it. Started with a tip as I recall.


NoEmailNec4Reddit

It's a lot easier to monitor how they play the game. Did they intentionally lose or intentionally perform worse, in order to make certain bets pay out.


Big_lt

The Detroit Lion players that got caught I believe they were on the teams.wifi network. From there you can see what sites they visit


lastsynapse

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.


ShowdownValue

Was wondering this too Why didn’t he just give the money to a friend to make the bet?


YessikaHaircutt

If you're talking about porter, a friend did make the bet. The issue is that he said he didn't feel well to get pulled from the game early and that made the friends bet win.