In generaly, I don’t agree with blaming dozens of personal delinquincies (when considering all sports, and I’m guessing we’ve caught a fraction of them examples) when a very obvious structural villain exists.
Second, and then I’ll leave this, I think the meteoric rise, in tandem, of:
The number of wagers one can place
The sum of money being wagered
The videogame-ification of gambling (they’ve basically done Joe Camel for gambling) and ease to do it
Fringe players being ensnared by gambling interests
The creation of platforms that criminals can easily use for fraud
Is honestly just so obvious that I’m having a truly difficult time ignoring the syngergy here. Like, you say Jontay Porter made “terrible financial decisions”. What were those? (they were gambling!)
And then yes, there is the very obvious PR problem that the company sponsoring your ESPN pre-game show, placing Jake Paul ads (wonder who that targets!) for their platform, is one of the primary vendors of the precise bets being abused.
if you want to get into the weeds and tell me you’re really confident Rozier would have found some other outlet for this without manipulating prop bets that are obviously enabled by gambling apps, I might give that to you as long as you’re willing to admit there are surely basketball players without which they’d be doing a lot better. In which case, what does it matter that Rozier specifically isn’t a victim?
During this time, Porter operated a Discord account that provided stocks, crypto and, occasionally, gambling advice for a monthly subscription of $49.99.
And yeah, a bunch of that stuff is “gambling” if you want to call it that. Not disagreeing with that.. But he pretty clearly was lighting money on fire in a number of ways
Hopefully it’s clear that I’m not claiming that these guys are sharp and brought to tragic ends at the hands of truly brilliant criminals. It’s that people with a bad combo of impulsiveness and intellect are more easily ruined bc betting is way way easier than it ever has been.
Porter owed gambling debts to the people who paid him to manipulate the lines. The Porter family seems to be congenitally sutpid so I don’t proscribe the idea he did other stupid things. Beasley has more than enough people willing to pop out of the woodwork to call him an idiot, so I won’t bother with that line of argument other than to say there will always be people who are easy to take advantage of, and part of the duty of the law (in a sensible world) is to prevent that from happening.
If anyone was able to get indebted in sports gambling when you have as much money as he does, he likely was dealing with bookies and/or offshore stuff right? That’s independent of the legal sports gambling apps, and athletes have gotten indebted that way many times before.
Yeah, I am just saying that guys who owe mobsters money are always the ones involved in match fixing and they were before all of this too.
The whole play is for these types of guys to get in the door, give them things and then get them in debt. These stories aren’t really new though.
For Chauncey maybe it was cards, for Porter it might have been get rich quick schemes or someone being his bookie, maybe for someone else it is drugs, or for some low-major college players it might just be $1000 bucks.
It’s all bad. Gambling apps (and things like advertising SGPs) are clearly bad for society overall.
I just think that this is a bigger problem FOR the league because of the rise of gambling than it is directly a product of the rise of gambling.
I still think the takeaway froim all this might be that it is hard to actually pull off because it is so easy to detect in regulated markets than that it is going to happen everywhere.
I don’t know that we can say the frequency is worse! I can buy the harm (because NBA fans are now basically ALL gambling customers) but they detected these situations in days right? And basically shut them down?
IIRC, the Tim Donaghy thing went on for years before being detected?
I was just referring to debts. I can’t sports gamble in GA and prob would not much if I could, but I assume that Fanduel isn’t letting guys bet on credit hundreds of thousands. I could be wrong.
I also think we may be talking different guys since there’s like 4 different ones being talked about
They definitely provide people with currency for free bets, etc., but no I don’t think they’re floating credit. I’m just saying they are providing the platform for the crimes, and the creation of the platform to a degree that never existed before likely increases the number of people abusing it. (I haven’t downloaded any of these apps, and won’t, so everything I know is from what I read)
So you agree that we’re locating many many more gambling addicts and think that general harm is both more frequent and much greater but you think specific harms that result in crime or unethical behavior is not more frequent?
Or maybe you want to say the very specific crimes where gambling apps themselves get ripped off and the perpetrators are often caught? Considering how vigilantly they police consistent winning at basically any volume, I might give you that one. The whole premise of the industry is to locate losers and get them to empty their pockets.
No. I think we’re locating things more easily that were previously harder to detect. And there’s more harm because the league is actively advertising gambling instead of pretending like it doesn’t exist.
You think the frequency of detecting the specific crime of defrauding casinos via prop bet manipulation is way up but the frequency of attempting this fraud is the same?
