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Federal authorities have said former NBA player Jontay Porter was encouraged to manipulate his player propositions due to outstanding gambling debt owed to another person.
The U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of New York filed the first charges against a conspirator in the alleged scheme involving Porter, a former member of the Toronto Raptors who was permanently banned from the league in April.
Long Phi Pham, of Brooklyn, was charged with conspiring to defraud a sports-betting operator, which is unnamed in the criminal complaint, but details in the filing indicate that the company is DraftKings.
Three unnamed co-conspirators are also included in the complaint, but Porter himself does not appear to be one of them.
According to the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Porter had “amassed significant gambling debts” to one of the unnamed co-conspirators, who encouraged Porter to clear those debts by leaving games early to ensure that the unders on his proposition bets would win.
Porter told the four co-defendants in a Telegram group chat that he would be removing himself from a January 26 game, and then left the game after playing just four minutes.
An unnamed relative of one of the co-defendants placed a $10,000 parlay on under totals for Porter’s points, assists, and steals, netting a $75,000 profit. Another defendant bet $7,000 on Porter’s points, rebounds, assists, and three-pointers for a $33,250 profit.
Porter then told the co-defendants that he would be removing himself from another game on March 20, and reached a profit-sharing agreement where Porter, Pham and another co-defendant would each receive 24 percent of the profits from wagers on Porter’s unders, while another person would receive 4 percent.
The four co-defendants were pictured at a casino, which was unnamed but can be identified as Resorts Casino Atlantic City where DraftKings operates a retail sportsbook. At the casino, the group placed six wagers, most notably an $80,000 parlay on six statistical categories related to Porter, which resulted in a profit of slightly over $1m.
In total, between the two games, the group won more than $1.275m on Porter-related wagers.
According to the 15-page complaint, DraftKings suspended one of the co-conspirator's accounts after the March 20 game, before the person could withdraw the majority of their winnings, and then reported the suspicious activity to the International Betting Integrity Association and the NBA.
On April 4, Porter texted the group that they “might just get hit with a RICO,” referring to being charged under the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, and asked if the group had “deleted all their stuff” from their cell phones.
The NBA announced a permanent ban for Porter on April 17.
“Whether on the court or in the casino, every point matters. As alleged, the defendant and his co-conspirators, as well as an NBA player, participated in a brazen, illegal betting scheme that had a corrupting influence on two games and numerous bets,” Breon Peace, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, said in a statement.
“This prosecution serves as a warning that fraud and dishonesty in professional sports will not be tolerated and those who engage in this flagrant flouting of the law will be prosecuted.”
During a conference call on Wednesday (June 5), the NBA's deputy commissioner and chief operating officer repeated recent comments from commissioner Adam Silver regarding the league's preference for a federal oversight framework for legal sports betting, but stressed that the Porter incident had highlighted the benefits of regulation.
"We were able to look at certain irregularities in betting lines, and the data that we were able to receive from our partners allowed this to come into the light," Mark Tatum told the Canadian Press and other agencies.
