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>It has a terrible potential to corrupt sport. When you can bet a lot of money on how long a college players plays, or how many points they get in a particular game, what's to stop them from having a relative make a bet and they just fake a cramp?

Or get assaulted or murdered, internet death pool style? All kinds of really fucked up incentives are created by these legalized betting apps.

I wonder how many people out there would take an assault charge to win a bet. Since there’s a market you could even get investors. Get $10million together, bet it with high odds, take 25% cut, spend 10 years in jail, live out the rest of your life in comfort.

Is any of that illegal besides the assault itself?

Very much so. Even planning it, without carrying it out, would be subject to criminal conspiracy charges. Recruiting people to the scheme (even the investors) would be soliciting a crime. It's illegal to interfere in the outcome of the game once the bet is placed. Finally, once it was proven you rigged it, you'd probably be forced to return the winnings anyway.

I'm sure an actual attorney could come up with even more reasons this is illegal.

Well darn.

Don't give up. You just need more investors to spread the risk :)

Doesn’t conspiracy require an act in furtherance of the crime?

Are you sure that the party who has solicited the crime is not the investors?

What makes it illegal to interfere in the outcome?

I'd think you'ď be VERY hard pressed to bet $10 million dollars, but I don't know that.

Pretend to be 1,000 people, and each sock puppet bets $10k.

Who’s taking the other side of the bet though? No smart bookie will dig themselves in such a hole, it would obviously be fraud and they’d stop accepting bets

One of the massive platforms, like DraftKings. They won't even notice. The point of all this is the effect of making sports betting legal.

Criminal conspiracy. The agreement to commit the crime is the crime. Not the assault. That is another crime.

A predicate action must be taken in order for this to stick. However, this can be literally anything to move down the proposed path of conspiracy. So if you made the plan then downloaded the app, that's criminal conspiracy

Do you think that might be a little extreme? Where is a legal betting app allowing people to bet on that?

At some point there is enough money triggered for a specific outcome of the game.

If hurting someone credibly increases the odds, it's not if but when will people cross the line.

"Revenue in the Online Gambling market is projected to reach US$97.15bn in 2024"

https://www.statista.com/outlook/amo/online-gambling/worldwi...

There is already $97 billion USD/year. Where is the evidence for what you're saying?

You're right. As david_shi also points out, there's so many other less bothersome ways it makes little sense to recourse to violence on online bets.

Looking into it, the vast majority of incidents are the player themselves betting against their team or losing on purpose, the same of ways matches have been fixed since the dawn of betting. Paying someone is just so much easier than fighting them.

While the opportunity for this isn't zero, the reality is that there are safer and more lucrative ways for criminals to make money, especially for those who have the aptitude to pull something like this off.

If you bet a player gets 0 points in a game and then you shoot them in the leg...you've essentially bet on them being shot in the leg!

If you make a bet on a performance and the athlete doesn't show up at all, the bet is voided. Why would you think this is a plausible scenario?

https://helpcentre.sportsbet.com.au/hc/en-us/articles/187169...

https://www.sportsbettingdime.com/guides/how-to/no-contest-b...

Can you show me any time what you're saying has happened?

Oddly enough, several professional sports gamblers were aware of a NBA referee manipulating game from their data analysis, well before the NBA became aware of it.

That was probably 10+ years ago and I suspect data analysis by the leagues is much stronger now. Still an insane line that needs to be walked between the leagues getting revenue from the sportsbooks and gambling not impacting that play.

Tim Donaghy (ref): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Donaghy

I don’t know how much cheating by referees has got to with it. But many years ago I found the NBA to be a foul shooting contest and gave up on it. It is unwatchable.

The modern NBA stinks for reasons far beyond refereeing and cheating. The Donaghy scandal was a "low point" but the game was 5x as watchable then

NBA bans Jontay Porter after gambling probe shows he shared information, bet on games.

“Porter took himself out of that game after less than three minutes, claiming illness, none of his stats meeting the totals set in the parlay. The $80,000 bet was frozen and not paid out, the league said, and the NBA started an investigation not long afterward.”

https://apnews.com/article/nba-jontay-porter-banned-265ad5cb...

It seems crazy that he would risk his career over a bet considering that his regular player salary was so much higher than $80K.

People who cheat often don't consider scenarios where they get caught.

It gets bad enough and I’ll offer odds on who’s throwing, how long until they are busted, and how severe the consequences.

That's not new, RIP Pete Rose

Clearly, it's going to happen anyway at least some of the time, but the "what's to stop" is pretty obviously getting caught. It's already happened in at least three instances from the past year I can think of, though I don't remember the names because they were all pretty small-time players (Jontay Porter, who was already mentioned, is one of them). Anyone that is caught doing it gets instantly banned from the sport for life, which hopefully provides an even larger counterincentive compared to whatever incentive there is to attempt throwing a game.

It's not perfect, but the leagues don't have much of a choice. The US Supreme Court ruled that banning sports betting was unconstitutional, so until the court rolls over to new justices with new opinions on the matter in a few decades, it isn't going anywhere. It doesn't make any difference how much some fans on the Internet don't like it. Federal lawmakers can't ban it.

> It has a terrible potential to corrupt sport

That ship sailed a looping time ago. Sports teams in the US are franchises. Like McDonalds. They exist to make profit. Lots of it.

It has nothing to do with sport.

Nothing to do with sports except for all the time and effort they put into playing games?

I think one of the uglier examples was an NFL team local to me.

They had one of if not the 'worst' season in the last 15 years or so and really didn't care. But a huge part of that was because the way all of the season tickets, merchandise deals, etc etc, didn't matter if the team was any good. Semi-Ironically the economics were explained by a huge fan of them; he appreciated the business savvy.

You should look at how other countries do professional sports.

The teams are not franchises, they can not simply "buy" whatever players they want, etc.

The BBC have a podcast called Sports Strangest Crimes. The most recent series was about Moses Sawbu who was match fixing in the lower leagues. Worth listening to it

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0jv3zvy

One participant can control the score in individual sports, like singles tennis or boxing (notorious for rigged matches).

It’s only “potential” insofar as bad behaviour may or may not be exposed sooner or later. I think it’s more useful to understand betting’s impact as a constant corrosive effect. Betting poisons the incentives