Every time someone – NFL Pro or Average Joe – logs into a sports betting app, their location is immediately available on a dashboard for integrity analysts to see.
How precise is the placement?
“A three-foot radius,” said Matt Holt, founder and CEO of US Integrity, which has partnered with nearly every major sports organization and sportsbook in North America to monitor any irregularities up to and including cheating, point shaving or game fixing. .
Essentially, they don’t just know who you are, but where you are. This means that if an athlete logs in while at a team facility – which the NFL prohibits even if they are betting on another sport – they will almost instantly be taken.
Or if, for example, a referee uses a friend’s account to log in from the pre-match dressing room, questions arise because the friend is not a referee and therefore would not be in that dressing room .
Global positioning is just one of the countless tools that US Integrity and other companies have today. There are real-time betting data and trends. There are advanced analytical programs that can instantly detect even the slightest variation from the norm, both overall and individual. There are intense social media monitoring systems.
“If there is harmful, suspicious or unexpected activity, we send an alert,” Holt said. “We are catching people at a higher percentage than ever in North American sports betting history.”
The headlines prove it.
The NFL suspended five players earlier this spring for between six games and an entire season. In the shorter suspension cases, the overall position proved that they bet on non-NFL games at team facilities.
College baseball saw the Alabama coach fired and Cincinnati resign in a scandal that began because unexpected bets were made in Ohio on an SEC baseball game played in Louisiana.
In Iowa, 41 college athletes from at least five different sports in Iowa and Iowa State are under investigation.
And just this week, Indianapolis Colts cornerback Isaiah Rodgers admitted he had “made mistakes” and was under investigation by the NFL for sports betting. . Per ESPN, it was discovered that up to 100 bets – mostly between $25 and $50 – were placed on NFL games, including the Colts, through an acquaintance’s account.
This is how the surveillance industry is made up.
For decades, legal sports betting operators in Nevada would roll their eyes listening to the NFL or NCAA talk about protecting the integrity of their games from sports betting. If they want games to be clean, casinos would argue and then legalize it, because the only defense against point shaving or game fixing was whatever oversight Vegas could provide, albeit extremely primitive at the time. era.
After all, no one was more interested in a clean game than the people taking the bets.
Well, five years ago the Supreme Court ruled that the legality of sports betting should be left to the discretion of states. So far, 33, plus the District of Columbia, have launched. Feeling a profit, every sports organization in the country joined in sports betting.
After a rush to legalize betting, states, books and leagues have now begun to focus on surveillance and detection. As new laws and data arrive, the system becomes more and more efficient.
“The reason everything is happening now is not because athletes are betting more today than two years ago,” Holt said. “It’s because the state gaming commissions are focused on that.”
Essentially, when an athlete, coach, referee or official gets caught, legalized sports betting isn’t causing the scandal, it’s detecting the scandal.
In Vegas, you can still hear the old-timers talk proudly about how the sportsbook destroyed a points-shaving ring involving the 1994 Arizona State basketball team led by guard Stevin “Hedake” Smith. Yet, due to limited detection tools, he was not discovered until the fourth game of the scheme.
Holt said if it happens in 2023, it will be immediate.
“For it to have been four games would have been embarrassing today,” Holt said. “The transparency we have today means we can go light years further than 10 or 15 years ago.”
Nobody is ready to say that nothing untoward is happening there. Everything is possible.
However, the power of advanced monitoring systems is clear both in scope (from the NFL to a random Iowa State athlete) and in how minor errors are (betting in the wrong place). Nothing even came close to paint shaving or game throwing.
Holt says the system will only get stronger and stronger. There are tools that aren’t public and as more places make betting legal (four more states are coming), the amount of data that aids in detection will only increase and the amount of bets with organized crime or unregulated offshore entities will decrease.
US Integrity, for example, is currently adding encryptions that will prevent anyone not authorized to bet – athletes, coaches and referees – from betting in the first place, eliminating some of the problems before they even arise.
“What I took away from the whole situation,” Colts linebacker EJ Speed told reporters this week after an NFL education session, “is not to play.”
Speed is smart. Anyone who might even be tempted to bet, let alone try to influence the action, should know that they are unlikely to beat the already large and ever-growing monitoring community.
Give it a try and you’ll probably, if not absolutely, be hooked.
And when they do, that’s not a sign that legalized sports betting is a problem, but legalized sports betting is actually the solution.