Big parlays, fake injuries and Telegram tips: The betting scandal in college and pro sports

Four men went to a New Jersey casino in March 2024, at the start of the men’s NCAA Tournament. While most of the attention in the sports world was on a pair of games in Dayton, Ohio, that would decide which teams would get the final spots in the round of 64, the men were focused on a forgettable NBA game, the Toronto Raptors hosting the Sacramento Kings. They were ready to make what they believed were the surest bets of their lives.

At about 6:30 that Wednesday evening, according to legal filings, one of those men, Mahmud Mollah, took cash in a blue bag and transferred it into his account with a casino, then made more than $100,000 in wagers on prop bets for Jontay Porter, a little-known center with the Raptors. Mollah’s bets all wagered that Porter would not reach the points, rebounds and assist thresholds the casino set for him in that game.

Putting that much money on a player few NBA fans even knew might seem risky, but Mollah and the other men were confident in the outcome: They had been talking directly with Porter for months. He had given them an assurance before the game that he would take himself out early and claim he was ill. This sequence of events, and other details of the scheme, are based on legal filings made by the Department of Justice in three cases over the last year.

According to law enforcement officials, it was not the first time Porter had faked a medical issue to get himself removed from a game and depress his stats, and they said he had been keeping the four men aware of his intentions in a Telegram chat. When Porter told the four men that he would come out early from a Jan. 26, 2024 game with an eye injury, Timothy McCormack bet $7,000 on a parlay that Porter wouldn’t hit his totals for points, rebounds, assists and 3s. He won $40,250. A relative of one of the other men won $85,000.

Two months later at the DraftKings Sportsbook in Atlantic City, according to court records, the men again bet heavily on the under on Porter’s props; Porter played just two minutes and 43 seconds and finished with zero points, zero assists and two rebounds.

That would be their last attempt to profit off of Porter’s play. The wagers, which would have netted Mollah and others more than $1 million in winnings, raised suspicions with DraftKings. It suspended his account and reported the wagers, prompting the trail of communication that ultimately put the bettors in the sights of the FBI.

Since last year, the FBI has been investigating what federal prosecutors say is a scheme to fix the play of professional athletes in order to win wagers on their performances. The investigations have so far led to charges for six people, and four of them have already pleaded guilty, including Mollah, McCormack and Porter, who pleaded to one count of wire fraud conspiracy. The others are believed to be in plea negotiations, based on legal filings made by the federal government.

But the investigation has led to what may become one of the most far-reaching scandals to hit sports in decades. The Athletic spoke with more than a dozen people in different corners of the NBA, college sports and betting worlds, including people briefed on the investigation and people with expertise on the wide-ranging intersections between casinos and sports teams. Many of the people spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the investigation or because they feared retribution or professional consequences for speaking publicly. A spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office of the Eastern District of New York declined to comment.

The Porter case is also linked to investigations into match-fixing across college sports, sources said, and five schools are being investigated by the federal government for their possible ties to the scheme. Alarms were raised when unnatural betting action moved the line on a Temple-UAB conference tournament game in March 2024; federal law enforcement is looking at whether the same group of bettors can be tied to unusual line movement on other college basketball teams this season as well.

The federal investigation has cast a cloud over college sports and the legalized gambling industry as they await the next turn and wonder how much more expansive the FBI’s findings will be, and who could be implicated. It is the largest conspiracy case yet since sports gambling was legalized for most of the country seven years ago, and the most prominent since the Arizona State point-shaving scandal of the mid-1990s.

Porter has already been banned from the NBA for not only manipulating his own stats during Raptors games, but also betting on the NBA and Raptors games via another person’s gambling account. Though Porter never played in a Raptors game he bet on, an NBA investigation found he did bet on the team to lose in a parlay bet. The NBA, like other pro sports leagues, does not allow players to bet on their own sport.

Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier reportedly is also under federal investigation after a game in March 2023, when he was still on the Charlotte Hornets, was flagged by an integrity monitoring company for potentially abnormal betting behavior. The NBA investigated Rozier and cleared him of any wrongdoing, a league spokesman said. The federal government continues to investigate.

“The NBA cleared Terry Rozier after a serious, professional investigation that included the FBI,” said Jim Trusty, Rozier’s attorney. “Our hope is that the prosecutors finish running down their leads, recognize there is no criminal case to be made against Terry, and that they have the professionalism to clear his name both privately and publicly.”

Gambling industry veterans claim that match-fixing of some sort has always been a part of sports, but it never has been as potentially identifiable as it is now because of the legalization and pervasiveness of sports gambling. It is now available in 38 states. (The Athletic has a partnership with BetMGM.) Sportsbooks, leagues, regulators and betting integrity monitors all closely watch wagers for hints of impropriety.

That has led to bans for players in two professional sports — the NBA and MLB — as well as suspensions in the NFL for a violation of the league’s gambling policy. A MLB umpire was fired after he shared a gambling account with a professional poker player and refused to cooperate with the league’s investigation.

NBA commissioner Adam Silver said the ability to monitor legalized betting has made it easier to keep tabs on potential illicit behavior in and around the game, much like how insider trading is monitored.

“We now have the ability, as opposed to the old days before there was widespread legalized sports betting, to be heavily into the analytics of every game, looking at any blip, anything that’s unusual,” Silver said. He added, “In terms of my faith in the future, human beings are fallible; I don’t want to suggest that we have a perfect system and there aren’t going to be any players that violate the rules. I certainly have absolutely no basis sitting here today to say there are multiple NBA players involved in anything inappropriate.”

When Porter was banned last May, it was a shocking moment across the sports world, as the first high-level ramification of its embrace of legalized sports gambling over the last decade. Now, the question is how far that scheme ultimately spread.

Although the full scope of the investigation is unknown, it has come at a crucial time. Legalized sports gambling, still only seven years old in the United States outside of a few states, is trying to legitimize itself. The sports world has never been closer to gambling, and now has a high-profile scandal that could rip into its credibility if more names come out and more games are known to have been involved.

Each unusual line movement is scrutinized closely. It may be a sign of potential illegal activity, or it may be what one sportsbook director called “seeing ghosts.”

That’s what had to be discerned when a Jan. 30, 2025 game between UNC Wilmington and North Carolina A&T triggered an alert from U.S. Integrity, which monitors betting lines for irregular activity. The morning of the game, NC A&T suspended three players for reasons that Colonial Athletic Association commissioner Joe D’Antonio said were unrelated to the gambling allegations. The line on that game began with UNC-Wilmington as an 11-point favorite before it surged to a 17.5-point spread. (UNC won by 24.)

“I don’t think there was anything behind that line movement,” the sportsbook director said. “It wasn’t that suspicious; everyone is on high alert.”

NC A&T has been linked to the NCAA’s gambling investigation, but D’Antonio said neither he nor the conference have been contacted by the FBI. The conference has heard from the NCAA, and is allowing the NCAA to run its investigation rather than doing one of its own.

“We live in a world right now where there is so much legalized gambling that is part of our makeup as a country you would hope that we wouldn’t be in scandalous situations,” D’Antonio said. “But the fact that gambling is legal, we have opened the door to these kinds of situations.”

(Ethan Miller / Getty Images)

Games for several other schools have also raised alarms for integrity monitoring services and gotten the attention of NCAA investigators. At least seven schools in all are believed to have drawn attention from the NCAA, according to multiple sources briefed on the case, not all of which have yet become public. The NCAA also has examined links between the Porter case and game-fixing in college. One person questioned by the NCAA was asked if they knew about Porter and the other men arrested along with him, said a source briefed on the investigation.

The alleged scheme seems to have eyed small- and mid-major schools. In late February, the University of New Orleans suspended four players from its basketball team. Vince Granito, the school’s interim athletic director, did not confirm or deny allegations centered on the basketball program, but said that UNO had conducted its own investigation and submitted its results to the NCAA after it received a letter of inquiry.

“Until we hear back from them on their conclusion, there’s really nothing for us to say,” Granito said. “The ball is in their court.”

Porter’s case has been the most substantive view into how the manipulation of player performance may have worked. The former NBA player, and brother of Denver Nuggets forward Michael Porter Jr., had fallen into “significant” gambling debt to some of the men, prosecutors said, and decided to work his way out of it by helping them win bets on his play.

Sources say that poker games, potentially rigged ones, are believed to have been one way some players could have been ensnared.

Porter told his alleged co-conspirators that he would take himself out early of a Raptors game on Jan. 26, 2024 because of an eye injury, and that he would leave the March 20 game because of illness. In one message obtained by the federal government, Porter says before the Jan. 26 game, “Hit unders for the big numbers. I told [Co-Conspirator 2] no blocks, no steals. I’m going to play the first 2-3 minute stint off the bench then when I get subbed out, tell them my eye is killing me again.”

One of the men, believed to be Long Phi Pham, then texted another alleged co-conspirator, Shane Hennen, “911” and also forwarded him Porter’s text message. He also sent Hennen a screenshot of his own betting slips on Porter, including one parlay where he bet $29,382 and would win $103,387. Hennen used that information to wager, according to legal filings, using others to place bets on his behalf.

Porter played 4 minutes and 24 seconds on Jan. 26 against the LA Clippers; it was enough to raise suspicion, as U.S. Integrity sent out an alert to sportsbooks the next day about his betting props. He then played fewer than three minutes against the Kings on March 20. According to prosecutors, he also texted his co-conspirators during halftime of a Jan. 22 game and to let them know he would not be on the floor to begin the second half after starting the game, “but if it’s garbage time, I will shoot a million shots.”

Porter seemed to be aware of what he was doing. He texted other defendants last April and said that they “might just get hit w a rico.” He also asked, according to legal filings by the prosecutors, if they had deleted incriminating information off their phones.

If they had, law enforcement still found plenty to work off. Prosecutors have cited messages they obtained off of phones and through their investigation. But the government has been very deliberate in what it has revealed in complaints against the six men who have so far been charged.

Pham was arrested last June at a New York City airport after he bought a one-way ticket to Australia. His lawyer told a federal judge Pham was going there for a poker tournament; a Department of Justice attorney disputed that claim and said Pham was attempting to flee. Pham, 39, has since pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud conspiracy.

Hennen, who his lawyer describes as a sports bettor and poker player, was arrested at a Las Vegas airport in January after he bought a one-way ticket to Colombia for what he claimed was dental work. In a legal filing, a DOJ lawyer said the government intended to charge him with money laundering and wire fraud conspiracy, though it has yet to do so. Hennen is now in plea negotiations, according to legal filings, and he and federal prosecutors told a federal judge that they expect to avoid trial.

But Hennen’s case was the clearest indicator from the government of how expansive its case may be.

“The FBI has been investigating, among other things, a fraudulent scheme to “fix” the performance of certain professional athletes in specific games in order to make profitable bets on the athlete’s performance in that game,” an FBI agent stated in a complaint filed against Hennen in January.

Lawyers for Porter and Pham declined to comment. Todd Leventhal, a lawyer for Hennen, denied that Hennen was a part of any match-fixing.

“There’s manipulating the game and then there’s betting on a game on what you would consider bad info, good information, inside information,” Leventhal said. “He lost a lot of money betting… He in no way manipulated or was in with these players at all.”

The NCAA doesn’t necessarily need to wait on potential involvement by law enforcement to proceed with its own investigations. NCAA investigations into potential violations of gambling rules have been on the rise since the broad legalization of sports betting, but most cases are related to athletes and coaches placing bets despite rules restricting them from doing so, as opposed to what transpired in the Porter case.

It is a black mark for the NBA, too. One player has already been banned not only for betting on his own team, but also for fixing his own statline. And if the league, and fans, believed that kind of behavior would be limited to players at the end of the roster, like Porter, the investigation of Rozier created louder questions about legalized sports gambling’s possible impact on the game and its integrity. Rozier is in the midst of a $96 million contract and is in line to make more than $150 million in career earnings.

Meanwhile, those in the gambling industry and following the FBI’s investigation are wondering how much the investigation will find, and who else gets caught up.

The Athletic‘s Ralph Russo contributed to this story.

(Illustration: Demetrius Robinson / The Athletic; Photos: Ethan Miller / Getty Images, John Hefti-Imagn Images)