News of a point-shaving scandal in college basketball broke last week involving 39 current and former players on 17 Division I teams.
Twenty men have been indicted in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania after allegedly taking bribes ranging from $10,000-$30,000 to influence games, ESPN reports.
Four of the players charged -- Simeon Cottle, Carlos Hart, Camian Shell and Oumar Koureissi – have played for their current teams this season. None of the allegations against them are from this season.
Authorities described five defendants as "fixers," who recruited players to participate in the scheme and offered bribes ranging from $10,000 to $30,000 to intentionally underperform. The bettors then placed and won millions of dollars in wagers on the fixed games, according to prosecutors.
Two of the defendants reported this week, Shane Hennen and Marves Fairley, were previously named in a federal indictment in the Eastern District of New York involving NBA teams.
The NCAA is asking the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to suspend so-called prediction markets until some safeguards can be put in place.
Les Bernal of Stop Predatory Gambling says prediction markets are specific bets that can be placed on just about anything, including sporting events.
“You can wager on celebrity movie awards programs. When the Los Angeles fires were happening, they were taking bets on the Los Angeles fires. But it's a yes-no prediction.”
In spite of some efforts to slow the spread, he says gambling has wormed its way into American life and has become a regular and accepted part of sports.
“The institution of predatory gambling has become so normalized in America. You have these financial interests that have found a way to circumvent state gambling laws.”
Bernal says the new college basketball scandal just shows how corrosive gambling has become.
“It's just highlighting what an epic public policy failure the legalization of commercialized sports gambling has become.”
He says merely banning prediction markets from the NCAA is not enough to fix the problem.
“Now it's metastasized like a cancer in almost every fiber of American life. They're trying to say, oh, we're okay with this form of predatory gambling, but we want to try to eliminate this new form of prediction markets.”
