The director of Responsible Gaming at BetMGM said the regulated sports betting market has detected integrity issues of suspicious bets and are at the forefront of educating athletes about the risks they face over the violations.
BetMGM’s Richard Taylor was among speakers who addressed the topic of sports betting integrity at recent Las Vegas gaming conferences.
“There have been integrity issues around sports since sports has been a thing,” Taylor said. “Even before [the Supreme Court struck down the ban on nationwide sports betting outside of Nevada in 2018] and us developing and launching in more than 30 jurisdictions, there were likely things going on with inside information. Because of the regulated and legal method in which we operate now, operators are able to detect things and share this information and make the alerts to the leagues and other necessary stakeholders to ensure appropriate action is being taken. You have seen that over the last couple of years, where athletes have been implicated and found to have violated integrity policies. Those were probably happening before, but because of our ability to monitor that with our team at BetMGM and other operators, we are able to use data in real time when anomalies are occurring.”
Taylor investigations by their team use a variety of methods of geolocation, for example, to determine if something nefarious is happening. A team of former law enforcement officials are monitoring the data feeds and working with the trading team, responsible gaming, and public-relations staff to ensure they stay on top of it every day.
“If the integrity of the game and outcome is questioned, it creates a negative experience for our players and issues for the leagues and the sport,” Taylor said. “If we’re going to continue to be able to offer these markets and give our players the ability to bet on these things when they want to, then we have to really work together and share this information.”
One of the criticisms of sports prediction markets, which are unregulated by states, and illegally operated offshore sportsbooks is that they don’t have the same integrity-monitoring procedures in place to protect bettors and leagues.
Like BetMGM, Eric Hession, president of Caesars Digital, said mobile technology has helped them track suspicious activity.
“If you know someone is a bad guy and he meets with three other people, you can tell they met. Their phones were close together when the suspicious bets came through,” Hession said. “We can see who they know and that’s how you track. That’s how the NBA players throwing a game tend to get caught. We’re able to track these groups of people that get back to the player, and you can see how that loop closes. Then you can let the authorities know.”
Hession said integrity issues happen most frequently in C-level sports like Eastern European tennis and third-level soccer, where players aren’t making a large amount of money.
“For the NBA level, it’s pretty rare,” Hession said. “We had MLB issues and a couple of NBA issues and a UFC fight that we caught and alerted the UFC. The systems to report it are getting better and better. We can notify the UFC and they can conduct an investigation, whereas before, they would get an alert after the fight. That didn’t help too much.”
Hession said one UFC matter was detected when someone showed up at the counter in North Carolina and three people in a row wanted to bet $9,000, a wager on a second round (knockdown) for the underdog.
“Then they got on a plane and bet the same thing in Indiana and got on a plane and came out to Vegas on the day of the fight and showed up at all the books around town trying to make this same bet,” Hession said. “We knew it was the same people once they got to Indiana and shut down, but when they came to Vegas they couldn’t bet with us, because we took the fight down. We knew it was a bad thing. Some books kept the bet up and we got a call from one that some guy at the counter wanted to bet $100,000 on it. Our head trader said you’ll lose that bet.”
Ray Koch, the director of sports betting at NASCAR, said they work with a lot of integrity partners, such as Sportradar, that monitor all betting activity across every operator around the globe. NASCAR gets weekly reports following the races on betting activity, odds changes, and other alerts about suspicious betting.
“From our athletes and drivers side, a lot of it is about education,” Koch said. “Sportradar does two sessions a year with drivers and employees. At NASCAR, our policy is that employees and team owners, drivers, and pit-crew members can bet, but not on NASCAR.”
NASCAR recently established a program whereby all employees are monitored to detect any gambling on their sport to stop a problem before it starts, Koch said.
“That’s the evolution of sports betting for leagues and operators. We can send over all the people who fall under our integrity policy and it will encrypt that data. If they try to bet on NASCAR, it will say max wager zero dollars. We think that’s a cool partnership that will hopefully stop a lot of these problems.”
In their prevention program, MGM Resorts and BetMGM partner with EPIC Global Solutions, a gambling-harm-minimalization consultancy, to deliver training programs educating people on problem gambling.
“People who’ve had a gambling problem and are involved in integrity issues , we put them in front of the audience to hear their stories,” Taylor said. “Last year, we held an event in Puerto Rico with Stevin Smith, who was at the center of the Arizona State University point-shaving scandal back in the 1990s. He told his story to a group of young athletes, both professional and amateur, and to see the engagement was incredible.”
The athletes asked questions about what led Smith down that path and how they could protect themselves, calling it a powerful exchange to see, Taylor said.
“Questions like how did it impact your spouse and family made it very personal in an educational session and will go a very long way in giving these young athletes everything they need to make the right decision about their conduct and protect their careers and livelihoods,” Taylor said. ‘Reminding them that it’s not worth it to violate the integrity of a sport and of your character for whatever money is being thrown at you. We as a society don’t do enough of these sessions, and it should start at the high school level of those getting ready to go to the next level.”
The efforts go beyond monitoring integrity.
Koch said NASCAR monitors social media for the protection of their drivers, because one of the downsides of sports betting is people who are abusive to athletes over lost wagers. They can scrub those comments and anything that constitutes a threat will be reported to law enforcement. “It is good for our drivers, especially coming off a bad performance.”
Taylor cited BetMGM recently unveiling an anti-harassment policy based on league partners saying athletes are getting messages on social media deemed nasty and even threatening before a game if they don’t perform well.
“At a certain point, enough became enough for us and we created this anti-harassment policy to monitor anyone reaching out to these athletes with threats,” Taylor said. “We’re taking these people off of our platforms, because if you conduct yourself in that manner, that’s not the player we want on our platform. We’re very proud of the steps we are taking and none of it was mandated by regulation. We wanted to take a hard line against these things and see how bad it can be for athletes, especially younger collegiate athletes trying to get an education and playing the game they love.”
