Who to trust in fantasy sports?
Chris Dell is the founder of BettingPredators.com and the lead fantasy football and sports betting analyst on ESPN 97.5’s “Late Hits.” He’s also our new sports editor at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Please note: This article should be considered opinion, not gambling advice. •
All’s fair in love and sports … until it isn’t. Pay-to-playsports have swept the world over the past decade, resulting in the fantasy sports industry alone gobbling up a market size of 26.98 billion USD in 2023. For us players in this 21st-century fantasy gamingphenomenon, there’s a ton ofmoney to be had. But there’s alsoa ton of money to be lost.
And unfortunately, a lot of greed and corruption is createdin the process.
This raises the soon-to-be $27 billion question … who can we actually trust with our hard-earneddollars?
Look no further than the NFFC (National Fantasy Football Championships) scandal of January 2024, which has swept the industry overthe past week.
Incase you missed it, here’s the general scoop: A group of fantasy players from the “Ship Chasing” podcast discovered an irregularity in one of their fantasy playoff contests. One of their opponents — i.e., one of the thousands of contestants also playing for a $150,000-to-first-place prize — illegallyswapped a player into their lineup after all lineups were supposed to “lock,” after kickoff, according to the NFFCwebsite rules.
By swapping these players illegally, this lineup stayed nearthe top of the leaderboard and remained in contention for top-heavy prize payouts in the five- to six-figure range. This discovery led to a complaint that reached NFFC founder Greg Ambrosius. Soon after, it resulted in the firing of an NFFC employee who had teamed up with an outside contestant to illegally alter their lineup—an inside job that is all too common in thepay-to-play world.
It was an isolated incident, theysaid. Thecontest would go on. All was fair in love and fantasy sports again … until it wasn’t.
More digging was done, and it was next discovered that this now-fired NFFC employee in question had a public relationship on Twitter dating back around a decade with the contestant he helped changethe lineup for.
Screenshots were taken. Twitter accounts were deleted. The real truth was comingto light.
Then, other instances of illegal, “post-lock” lineup changes were discovered. Multiple offenses, all by the same contestant, spread acrossdifferent contests.
Were these all instances of the same fired NFFC employee colluding with his same,good old buddy?
Were there other friends, family members, and even NFFC colleagues who partook?
For a fantasy sports industry projected to double in growth and reach a market valuation of nearly $50 billion in the next few years alone, how much of this is happeningdaily?
How do we actually know the money we deposit into websites like NFFC, FanDuel and DraftKings, to name a few, isn’t being tampered with by an inside man, or in some cases, “inside men” plural? Where there’s this level of money involved in a given industry, there’s also often a similar, eventual level of corruptionand collusion.
“We’rein an era where people want to jump to conspiracy theories. Now, not only do you know that It can occur, but it did occur, I think that’s going to spread the seeds of distrust,” Peter Overzet of the Ship Chasing podcast, told ESPNthis past week.
“It wouldn’t have stood out unless you were intimately familiar with how that contest works.”
If it took Mr. Overzet — a longtime, trusted and beloved memberof the fantasy football community— this long to find it, then how long will it take most of us, who have far fewer resources?
Sadly, this early into a scandal of this potential magnitude, there is no end in sight.
There’s no telling how big this can get, or if this was the first time someone actually wascaught … publicly.
“This isn’t just your friend cheating in Monopoly,” my Post-Gazette fantasy football show co-host Tony Squares said.
Mr.Squares is spot on.
So is Mike Florio of Pro Football Talk, who wrote this week that “the termination of the employee and disqualification of the contestant shouldn’t be the end of this, butthe beginning.”
These individuals — just twofor now — have likely broken multiple state and federal laws.
So far, most of us every day fantasy players are used to actual cheating coming in the form of Pete Rose or hearing thatan NFL player like Calvin Ridley — or most recently, the Patriots’ Kayshon Boutte — has been punished for breaking the rules and betting on things they shouldn’t be betting on. Let’s not forget disgraced NBA referee Tim Donaghy, who pled guilty in 2007 to felony charges for taking cash payments from gamblers and betting on games he officiated.
Heck, even Wikipedia has an entire A-to-Z catalog of “Sports people involved in bettingscandals.”
Counterfeiters making fake lottery tickets in Cuba reportedly made $600,000 a month back in 1914, according to a “special cable to The New YorkTimes.”
Even the 1950s “quiz show scandals” (yes, that’s a real thing, look it up) led to a 1954 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that radio and television quiz shows could give prizes to their contestants, but only if they did not contribute any of their own money in the process.
Arguably, none is more well-knownthan the “The Triple6 Fix,” also known to Pennsylvanians as “The Pennsylvania 6-6-6- Scandal,” when weighted lottery balls were injected with paint to help produce only specific numbers. This 1980 scandal eventually led to grand jury charges and lengthy prison sentences, a casereported originally by the PittsburghPost-Gazette.
This isn’t the first time it’s happened in the fantasy space,either.
And it certainly won’t be thelast.
We’re far past the point of figuring out whether the payto-play industry can — or, in some cases, even cares to — policeitself.
So goes the NFFC scandal of 2024, an entity which is owned by SharpLink Gaming Ltd, listed under the NASDAQ as “SBET” and worth$3.44 million USD.
No public statement has been issued from SharpLink sofar.
This ongoing scandal has the chance not only to uncover widespread fraud but soon become a fantasy sports wildfire, engulfing innocent players into a possible classaction lawsuit against billiondollar entities who are supposed to ensure the security and “fairness” of our pay-toplaycash in their hands.
All’sfair in love and fantasy sports … until we again discoverthat it isn’t … Keepdigging, folks. Thetruth will come out.
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