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Comment by rjbwork | Hacker News Reader

>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.

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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?

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