AILSA CHANG, HOST:
Well, another major sports gambling scandal has come to light. Federal prosecutors in Pennsylvania today announced charges in connection with a widespread scheme to fix college basketball games. The indictment alleges that dozens of players from 17 Division I teams were paid cash bribes to underperform, as betters placed millions of dollars in wagers on the fixed games. NPR sports correspondent Becky Sullivan joins us now to talk about all this. Hi, Becky.
BECKY SULLIVAN, BYLINE: Hey, Ailsa.
CHANG: Hey. OK, so tell us what prosecutors say they found here.
SULLIVAN: Yeah, so they say that this scheme was first cooked up in the fall of 2022 by a pair of, like, high-stakes gamblers - gambling influencers, essentially - who came up with this. It's just a classic point-shaving scheme, really. Basically, they bribed players to play poorly. Then they would bet a bunch of money on that team to come up short against the spread. And so they start with an American player, the indictment alleges, who's playing overseas in the Chinese professional basketball league. And then as that worked, ultimately, they decided to move on to the NCAA here in the U.S. And ultimately, prosecutors say they entangled dozens of players over two seasons, as you say, and now there are 26 people who are facing charges. Most of them are former players.
CHANG: Amazing. OK, so did this alleged scheme actually work?
SULLIVAN: I mean, well, until now, yeah.
CHANG: (Laughter).
SULLIVAN: The players were offered bribes, cash bribes of, like, $10,000 up to $30,000 delivered in cash. The conspirators, prosecutors say, targeted players whose, you know, payments that they receive from name, image and likeness, that kind of licensing stuff that college players can get paid for now...
CHANG: Yeah.
SULLIVAN: ...They targeted players from small-time schools who just weren't making that much NIL money, if any at all. So we're talking schools like Eastern Michigan, Kennesaw State, Nicholls State. These are not big-time programs. The biggest name of a school in this is DePaul. That's in the Big East Conference. That's, like, kind of a historically very significant college basketball conference. And so players are alleged to have fixed games against, like, Butler, Georgetown, St. John's. These are - this is a big deal, even though they're kind of small-name schools.
CHANG: Yeah.
SULLIVAN: There's also huge amounts of money involved in all of this. One of the details from the indictment is that a player got paid $200,000 in cash in a package that was delivered to a storage unit in Florida. The evidence also includes all these text messages, photos, details about the bets and when to pick up the money. And, you know, one text message that caught my eye from this. One conspirator texted another, nothing is guaranteed in this world but death, taxes and Chinese basketball.
CHANG: Wow.
SULLIVAN: Yeah.
CHANG: Well, I have a question, Becky, because this feels like it's the latest in a whole series of big federal indictments...
SULLIVAN: Yeah.
CHANG: ...About corruption in sports gambling, right? Like, I remember there was one involving the NBA last fall, then one...
SULLIVAN: Yes.
CHANG: ...With a couple Major League Baseball pitchers. How does this case compare with those cases?
SULLIVAN: Well, I think, especially compared to the NBA indictment, this one is worse in a way. In the NBA one, you had people that were sort of, like, in another way of saying it, trading on insider info. A player knew who was going to sit out a game, so he told a friend. That friend sold that information to betters. But in this, you have players bribed directly to alter their performances. These games were clearly affected by that. Federal prosecutor David Metcalf of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania spoke to that today.
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DAVID METCALF: When criminals pollute the purity of sports by manipulating competition, it doesn't just imperil the integrity of sports betting markets, it imperils the integrity of sport itself and everything that sports represent to us - you know, hard work, determination and fairness.
SULLIVAN: So the victims here aren't just the betting companies, he says, but also, like, the teammates who thought they were competing for real and fans who were watching.
CHANG: Yeah. Well, are there any takeaways here for college basketball, you think?
SULLIVAN: Well, I think the NCAA is uniquely vulnerable to this. They have - you know, there's 360-plus teams in Division I college basketball. There are thousands of games every season. That's just men's Division I basketball alone. There has been a massive effort by the NCAA over the last five years to figure out how to kind of adequately protect against all this. Today, they thanked law enforcement. They said the integrity of the game is of the utmost importance. They're running their own investigations. But this is why the NCAA advocates for regulations on gambling on college sports.
CHANG: That is NPR's Becky Sullivan. Thank you, Becky.
SULLIVAN: You're welcome.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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