How Gamblers Are Rigging College Basketball

0:05In 2024, a man wanted to rig a college basketball game so he could bet on it and make some money. So he sent a text message to a group chat. You got somebody at Robert Morris? Robert Morris is a small D1 college in Pennsylvania. And the sender was trying to find someone on the team who would agree to throw the game. Our colleague Jared Diamond covers sports and sports betting, and he followed the events that started with this text message. How did the person on the other end of that text respond? Very quickly, it became clear that somebody in this group did in fact have somebody at Robert Morris who might be willing to shave points or throw a college basketball game in exchange for money.

0:53That person was Marquise Hastings, the leading scorer for Robert Morris that year. Hastings allegedly agreed to not only help, but also recruit two of his teammates to join in. What they needed to do was underperform, miss shots, make dumb fouls. Hastings from outside. Oh, what a hard backass. All to make sure that their team was down by at least two points at the end of the first half. And a foul at the other end of the floor. In the meantime, the people who were responsible for these text messages were furiously betting as much money as they possibly could against Robert Morris covering the spread in the first half of that game.

1:35Those gamblers got away with lots of money as a result of those bets. And not long after that, the gamblers met up with the player and said, hey, here's your bribe payout that we promised you in exchange for doing what you did. So essentially, they were cheating to make money. Yeah, very simply. It is the simplest, sort of most classic form of corruption in sports.

2:05These gamblers were caught and charged in this alleged point-shaving scheme. And earlier this year, a judge unsealed a federal indictment against them, bringing the details of this scheme to light for the first time. Hastings, the player, has pleaded not guilty. But even though the alleged gambling ring was uncovered, Jared says the damage to sports and this year's March Madness tournament has already been done. You know, everyone's talking about what happened, and it's understandable. But even what didn't happen is a problem, right? You don't even need games to be on the take for there to be big problems with sports.

2:44You just need people to wonder if they are, right? And now, I find, I think a lot of fans probably feel this way, it's going to be a lot harder to watch, especially smaller college basketball, without having in the back of your mind, is this real? Is what I'm watching genuine? Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Ryan Knudsen. It's Wednesday, March 18th.

3:18coming up on the show inside a college sports betting ring

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4:35At the center of this gambling ring at Robert Morris were two men, Shane Hennon and Marvez Fairley. And essentially, these are a group of hustlers, for lack of a better word, people that are in the sports gambling space. In the case of guys like Shane Hennen and Marvez Fairley, there are people they, as part of, for a living, essentially sell gambling picks, right? They run Instagram accounts and websites where they, they're touts. It's called being a tout. You sell good gambling picks to people willing to pay for your expertise. Here's Fairley touting picks in a video on Instagram.

5:25Fairley's lawyer declined to comment on the college basketball rigging accusations. An attorney for Hennon has said that his betting losses were far bigger than his winnings. The two allegedly got their start rigging basketball games in China by connecting with an American in the Chinese Basketball League. And they continued what they were doing in the U.S. There are two things that helped Hennon and Fairley. The first is the rise of sports betting apps, like DraftKings and FanDuel, that brought millions of dollars into the sports betting world and made it possible to make a lot more money than when betting markets were limited to Vegas and the black market.

6:06We are in the era of ubiquitous legal sports gambling in the United States. You can bet at a legal sportsbook or online sportsbook, FanDuel DraftKings, on any college basketball game, Division I college basketball game, anywhere in the country, right? Those markets are available. Doesn't matter if it's Duke or Robert Morris. Those markets are out there. You can bet on them. The Sportsbook Alliance, which represents major online betting apps like FanDuel and DraftKings, said in a memo that legal sports betting enables transparency, empowers oversight, and strengthens accountability. It said, quote, Regulated U.S.

6:41sports betting industry is not a threat to sports integrity. It's a cornerstone of it. The other thing that helped this scheme is that a few years ago, college athletes were finally allowed to make money off their skills, mostly through name, image, and likeness deals, basically endorsements. But only the top players get that. You go to North Carolina, If you're a big recruit that's North Carolina, Duke, Kansas, and Kentucky want, there might be millions of dollars for you to choose that school. But there are, you know, 400 college basketball teams around. Most of them are not Duke, North Carolina, Kansas, Kentucky.

7:24Most of them are Abilene Christian, Southern Mississippi, Robert Morris, Buffalo, whatever it is. there's no nil money for you essentially probably not there's no there aren't companies begging to have high school recruits sign with those schools there is no nil money for you maybe the local car wash in the in the college town but nothing no no big bucks right maybe yeah we'll get them a pair of sneakers or something you know like but there isn't the big money in the nil world in the pay for play world. They're operating in entirely different financial realms, essentially. So these small schools, if you're a player, they're not making any money.

8:05The players aren't making money, but you can still bet on the games. And that's where Hennon and Fairley come in. They have connections in the college basketball world, people that are in the basketball space, guys that are, you know, local coaches, AAU coaches, you know, that might work as, you know, advisors or agents, these type of people. The people that are sort of in the college basketball sphere. They get them in and say, hey, we can make some money doing this. We just got to get to players, find some players willing to do this. So they start. They start targeting small teams, teams like Robert Morris, Southern Mississippi, Abilene Christian.

8:43Yeah, and I can see how their offer might be really tempting because they don't make any money. So here's a chance. That's why they target them because they're more vulnerable, right? They could say, hey, your buddies, the guy that you grew up with, the kid that you played against your whole life who's at Kansas, he's making$800 ,000 this year. What are you making? Well, I could pay you something. There's no chance you're going to go to the NBA. This is probably going to be the end of your career here in college. You're at a small school. It's very rare that someone of these small schools is going to the NBA.

9:09So you could see how these players would be vulnerable to something like this. The other way Hennon and Fairley tailored their offers was to try to make the players feel like they weren't actually throwing these games. They were just shaving a few points off the first half. These days, you could bet on just about anything. And one of the things you could bet on is not just the point spread of the full game, but the point spread of just the first half of a college basketball game. And they were able to tell these kids, hey, we're not even asked you to lose the game. Just make sure at the end of the first half, you're, you know, down by at least five points.

9:41Then after halftime, go out there and do your thing. Take care of business. Win the game. Kind of diabolical because you could see, at least I could see, how the player might be able to rationalize that in his head. Well, I'm not throwing the game. Yeah, I'm not actually losing everything for my team. I'm just going to make a little bit of money and then I'm going to have a great comeback. And then the second half, no harm, no foul. We'll win the game by 10. No one will ever notice. Well, guess what? For two years, nobody did notice. Now people notice. In total, prosecutors say this scandal involved at least 39 athletes across 17 different schools.

10:17All in all, this ring of gambling organizers cleared millions of dollars. They made millions of dollars, many millions, over the span of several years with several teams. In many cases, they were individual games where across multiple sportsbooks, they were putting down. well into the six figures, just on one game, right? Not all in one bet, not all one person, but they had a network of people that were all involved, all placing bets, pooling the money. There were games, they had$200 ,000,$300 ,000,$400 ,000 on the line in one game. You could clear a lot of money if you have that much money on the outcome of one game.

10:58You're doing this again and again and again. How this scheme fell apart is after the break.

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12:39Hennon and Fairley's college basketball gambling scheme was first uncovered in the NBA. The same people who ran this scheme in low-level D1 basketball ran a similar scheme in pro basketball. It started with a former Toronto Raptors player named Jontae Porter. That was uncovered because someone in the proxy network of bettors got a little too greedy, let's say, placed a bet on John Day Porter failing. This was about John Day Porter individual prop bets, right? John Day Porter failing to reach certain thresholds and points, rebounds, assists. Tried to bet a little too much money at one time on that market.

13:20And the sportsbook said, no, no, no, no, no. This is very suspicious. There's no way that somebody's going to be betting this much money on this small outcome. They were betting more money on one bet on Dante Porter's props than, like, had probably been bet all together in the entire season around the country. After this NBA scheme was uncovered, the U.S. government started investigating and found that it was also allegedly happening in college basketball. That is essentially what we know about how it got uncovered. But it's important to understand that all of these basketball gambling cases, and I've come on this podcast and talked about versions of this probably two or three other times, even before this conversation.

14:03They're all of a piece, right? They're all related. They all involve some of the same people. There's through lines running through all of them.

14:15What has the NCAA said about this cheating scandal and the ability for people to cheat in this way? The NCAA is, I wouldn't say panicking, but they're certainly less than thrilled, let's put it that way. The NCAA has this entire time been a lot more outspoken against the rise of gambling in this country than the professional sports league. The NCAA does not have any official sportsbook partners. College athletes are not allowed to sports bet at all of any kind, right, even on professional sports. They've also, the NCAA, for the past at least year, maybe even longer, has been trying, lobbying states, to stop allowing prop bets on college players.

15:06Prop bets are basically a bet on anything other than the final outcome, like the number of three-pointers that'll be made in a game, or whether or not there'll be overtime, or how specific players will perform. For example, someone could bet$10 that a player will score more than 15 points, or that they'll score less than that. These kinds of bets are extremely popular, both in pro and college sports. And they make the NCAA, the association that oversees college sports, extremely worried. Here's NCAA President Charlie Baker in a video about this case. The NCAA has the largest integrity monitoring program in the world, But we still need regulators and gaming companies to eliminate collegiate prop bets, especially on first-half unders.

15:54First-half unders. That's betting that the score will come in lower than expected in the first half, like what happened in that Robert Morris game. That's why today I sent a letter to the state gaming commissions urging them to ban these bets. The gaming companies can also do this right now and take them off their platforms. This is the right thing to do to better protect athletes and our games. The NCAA has called on some states to outlaw prop bets on college athletes. Some states have agreed, but many still allow them. But it's an uphill battle because these sportsbooks love these other bets.

16:30They love the props. They love these parlays and all these things like this. So that's because they're sucker's bets, if we're being honest, right? They're great margins for the sportsbooks. So they're not inclined to stop offering them. Again, so really, you're not going to get anywhere with the sportsbooks, right? Your best chance is with the regulators. So it's the beginning of March Madness, one of my favorite times of the year. Do you think that there's a chance that in this tournament that some moments or some first halves or some outcomes even could be fixed by the players in a scandal like this?

17:06I think it's impossible to rule it out. And that's the problem. These are the guys we know about. That's the problem. That is the problem with all of this, right? These are giant businesses that bring in billions of dollars a year. But what's interesting about them is they are completely predicated. The entire business completely relies on one assumption, one sort of given truth, which is the product is genuine. The players are going to go out there and play as hard as they can to win and represent their school. That is genuine competition. that it is not WWE. Now, across the world of sports, people are starting to doubt that it is real.

17:50In the gambling world, suddenly we've come to realize that what we thought was the sort of accepted truth is an incredibly fragile thing. And it's teetering right now. And the reason I know it's teetering, if you go on social media, on any NFL Sunday, somebody drops a pass or fumbles the ball. What are all the tweets? Oh, he must have had that on the take. Did he have money on that? Did he really fumble that on purpose? Or this decision to slide before getting tackled or go out of bounds here, five yards short of this, was a huge deal in this particular betting market. Right. Look, probably nothing is going on.

18:30But just the thought, just the thought creeping into your mind as a fan, it risks bringing down the entire industry. And that's the problem with watching this NCAA tournament, right? We would like to just turn off our brain and just get into the madness, right, of seeing, you know, whatever, whatever state upsetting Villanova. Is Villanova good this year? Upsetting UConn. UConn's good. That's what we want to believe. But at least for me, as someone that's now been writing about covering sports gambling for now over two years, I have trouble watching and keeping this out of my mind. I can't watch someone make a mistake in a sporting event now without thinking to myself, wait a minute.

19:16And that's the problem.

19:29That's all for today. Wednesday, March 18th. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal. Additional reporting in this episode by Louise Radnovsky.

19:43Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow. Do you want to bet on whether I can spin this basketball on my finger? I don't bet as a rule because I know too much. But if I did bet, I would not take. I would bet against you, I have to be honest. I just won. Well, I didn't say in how many attempts. We had to be more specific. Very good stuff. All right. Thanks, Jared. Really appreciate it. You got it. The Future of Everything is The Wall Street Journal's flagship live event. Returning to New York City May 4th through 5th. Be there as CEOs, policymakers, and innovators sit down with our journalists to answer the most pressing questions of the day.

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