A new federal indictment against a group including more than two dozen former college and professional basketball players alleges a years-long, multinational game-rigging conspiracy, according to new court documents unsealed Thursday.
The indictments are connected to alleged coordination with players in the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) and Chinese Basketball Association (CBA), and include alleged bribery in sports, conspiracy to commit wire fraud, wire fraud, and aiding and abetting, according to a Thursday NBC report. Prosecutors allege the group engaged in a “point-shaving” scheme, in which players would manipulate the final margin of a game and cash in on sports bets with their insider information.
“We allege an extensive international criminal conspiracy of NCAA players, alumni and professional bettors who fixed gains across the country and poisoned the American spirit of competition for monetary gain,” U.S. Attorney David Metcalf told reporters on Thursday, according to NBC.
Metcalf said that 26 people total “perpetrated a transnational criminal scheme to fix NCAA Division I men’s basketball games as well as professional Chinese Basketball Association games.”
The indictment, however, only named 20 defendants, according to NBC, including 16 former college basketball players. Two individuals dubbed “high-stakes sports gamblers,” who previously were charged with rigging bets on NBA games in October, were also implicated in the new indictment, Reuters reported Thursday.
Prosecutors allege the conspiracy started in 2022, when the defendants first bribed CBA players to manipulate games, NBC reported. In 2023, the defendants then targeted NCAA basketball games in the U.S. and bribed players to manipulate score spreads in payments “ranging from $10,000 to $30,000 per game,” according to the indictment.
The increasing popularity of sports betting in the U.S. has seen a number of similar cases perpetrated in the past years as regulators scramble to crack down on alleged conspiratorial groups.
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