Photo via the Dallas Morning News
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One early October morning, just two days into the new season, the NBA was rocked by a federal investigation that resulted in the arrest of Hall of Famer and current Portland Trail Blazers head coach Chauncey Billups. Billups was arrested for his alleged participation in an extensive, years-long scheme to defraud card players in poker games said to involve members of La Cosa Nostra. The operation included specially designed contact lenses, rigged shuffling machines, and hidden cameras, which caused losses of up to $7 million for the victims. At this point, the only thing missing was The Godfather.
The most troubling aspect of the FBI’s investigation was not the mafia-led enterprise but rather the arrest of six others, including a current player, who turned “professional basketball into a criminal betting operation.” The indictment details numerous instances in which sources inside certain teams provided crucial injury information to bettors. The most egregious instance involves current Miami Heat player Terry Rozier leaving a game early due to a purported injury. Rozier notified a friend of his plan, and the friend placed over $200,000 in wagers predicting that Rozier would underperform in key statistics.
These schemes are far easier to pull off because they don’t require a sprawling operation to net massive profits. The days of match-fixing and movie-esque operations are over. The team involved in the most infamous betting scandal, the 1919 Black Sox scandal, came within two wins of capturing the World Series and ruining the entire scheme. The 20th century is riddled with scandals that read like movie scripts involving mafia members, mediocre players, and mixed financial results.
Stories like these are typically what sports betting looked like in the late 20th century. Under a 1992 federal law, sports betting was banned in all states except Nevada, which was granted an exception due to the boost casinos provided to the economy. Bets placed on sporting events were few and far between, reserved only for in-person bets made at a casino in Las Vegas. This made it significantly easier for sportsbooks to track illegal betting activity and warn leagues of such activity. While scandals still persisted, most notably during the 2007 NBA season, they were relatively isolated events in a tightly controlled ecosystem. Limited access means fewer opportunities for coordinated schemes, and, since the schemes usually involved the mafia, the federal government had a much easier job bringing aggressive charges against bad actors.
Now, all it takes is one bad actor with access to critical information.
To understand how we arrived at today’s sprawling, hyper-accessible betting ecosystem, it’s worth tracing two parallel shifts: first, the unraveling of America’s legal restrictions on sports betting, and then, the technological boom that turned betting into something you can do from the comfort of your own couch.
The modern age of sports wagering begins with the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA) of 1992. Designed to curb the rise of sports betting, PASPA effectively outlawed sports betting nationwide, with Nevada the only statewide exception to the law. The bill passed overwhelmingly in the U.S. Senate (88–5) in the aftermath of Pete Rose’s permanent ban from baseball for betting on his own games. The bill was widely popular, with some arguing that the bill offered too many exceptions and should instead completely ban sports betting. While the government acknowledged that illegal activity would persist, the money involved would remain relatively minimal and inconsequential in the grand scheme of the U.S. economy.
Estimates in 1999 of the scope of illegal sports betting activity ranged from $80 billion to $380 billion, making sports betting the most popular form of gambling in America. Though the U.S. government would be interested in taxing that activity, illegal betting is virtually impossible to track and enforce. For example, a handshake bet between two friends has no paper trail and is usually for minuscule values, making it impractical to charge these friends with a crime.
For a long time, American sports leagues supported anti-betting legislation, and future scandals only intensified the need for stricter regulation. The leagues joined together in efforts to stop states like Delaware and New Jersey from legalizing sports betting at their casinos and racetracks. However, as the sports betting industry became increasingly lucrative, the dam eventually broke. Adam Silver, commissioner of the NBA, asserted that there is “an obvious appetite among sports fans” for legalized sports betting activity. Coincidentally, the NBA changed its position after a substantial investment in daily fantasy sports operator FanDuel. While Silver may claim to have been prioritizing the will of the people, his decision was ultimately driven by the profits his association would receive. That is the story of the next ten years of sports betting in America—welcoming with open arms the sportsbooks and casinos that were once the archnemesis of the integrity of these leagues.
While leagues were abandoning their hardline stance, an even more consequential shift occurred outside the league offices. Technology was transforming gambling at a rate that lawmakers never anticipated. The spread of smartphones and sophisticated data analytics created an infrastructure where sports betting could happen anywhere, anytime, and on virtually every aspect of the game. The rise in the popularity of prop bets—wagers on specific players or events—correlates directly with the proliferation of mobile betting infrastructure. Prop bets are incredibly successful for sportsbooks, as bettors will often combine prop bets despite increasingly long odds. The allure of hitting the perfect parlay keeps bettors, most of whom are young adults, coming back for more.
The rise of prop bets has left sportsbooks and leagues susceptible to a new class of manipulation—one that requires far fewer actors and far fewer resources than typical match-fixing schemes. Unlike wagers tied to the final outcome of games, prop bets hinge on singular, easily manipulated moments: a single rebound, a missed pitch, or a yellow card. This dramatically lowers the barrier to entry for nefarious actors. A lone player, no matter how talented, could make thousands of dollars because of a single piece of information or a single play. These possibilities create greatly outsized risks to the integrity of any sport.
The most immediate and obvious solution is the elimination of prop bets. Bets on singular moments leave sports, fans, and sportsbooks incredibly susceptible to bad-faith actors. While prop-bets have undoubtedly been a major success for sportsbooks, shifting the focus to macro bets makes them much harder to rig, and those ambitious enough to try are significantly easier to identify and stop. Advanced algorithms have already made it difficult to discreetly place rigged bets, and narrowing the scope of betting would make it virtually impossible.
The second and least likely solution is reinstatement and revision of PASPA. In his opinion on the 2018 case, Justice Alito directly and unequivocally declared that “Congress can regulate sports gambling directly,” leaving the door open for direct federal control of sports gambling. A total ban is also a possibility but grows increasingly unlikely as sportsbooks exert lobbying influence. The issue for any bill hoping to regulate sports wagering in this country is money. Sports leagues are so deeply intertwined with betting that any regulation has little support from those with decision-making power.
Yet the danger of prop bets extends far beyond the boundaries of professional sports. Micro-wagering has begun to infiltrate other spheres of public life. Residents of NYC would have likely noticed ads for Kalshi, a de facto betting platform, around the city in the weeks leading up to the mayoral race. The website offered bettors a chance to wager real money on the mayoral race, and the ad campaign was successful, generating over $63 million in bets on the race alone. The CEO of Coinbase rattled off a series of buzzwords at the end of a Q3 earnings call to upend prediction markets that had odds on which words the CEO would say during the call.
The broader cost of this trend is far more alarming than any single scandal. In a country already fraught with partisan suspicion and election distrust, turning democratic opportunities into betting opportunities only deepens the cynicism. When the outcome of a mayoral race or a presidential debate becomes just another bet, it erodes the idea that these events are civic responsibilities and not simply another opportunity to get rich. Sports betting may have initially been reserved for the mafia and handshake bets between friends, but its logic–micro-wagers, insider edges, and profit over people–bleeds into the core institutions that bind our country together. If we let the principles of betting migrate from sports to democracy, we may find that the real gamble is on the stability of our country.
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This article was edited by Eliana Tesfaye.
Cooper Toland 
Glenmarie Rios Rodriguez 
Domenick Fedele