There’s been several celebrated scandals recently involving sports betting in the U.S. — pro basketball and baseball players are accused of manipulating prop bets in small but important ways. But I want to talk with you today about a much less famous, but perhaps more important, online betting scandal: addiction.
Most of you know I normally write about scams, and this week’s episode of The Perfect Scam is an exploration of fake ticket sales online. If you listen, you’ll hear about Facebook groups devoted to scamming fans via bogus sales, and you’ll hear about an NYPD investigator who chased down a single criminal who spent three years stealing from NFL and NBA fans looking for tickets.
The arrest of the criminal, Nikhil Mahtani, got a fair amount of media attention in New York — the full investigation story is a good listen — but here’s what most reports missed. Matami stole well into six figures through his bogus sales. Where did all that money go? When McCaffrey showed up to arrest Mahtami, I asked if he was driving around in a sports car?
“Quite the opposite,” Detective Michael McCaffrey told me. “Our first human interaction with Mahtani was … he was sleeping on the couch in his mom’s apartment, so the exact opposite of what you just said.”
So where did all the money go?
“From what we could gather based off the records that we were able to get, Mahtani was taking a lot of the proceeds of his scam, and he was pushing them into Draft Kings and Fan Duel; so he was doing his own betting with the proceeds.”
Mahtani was covering gambling debts with fake ticket sales on Craigslist. And he did very little to hide his tracks. The scam was simple. He placed posts on Craigslist saying he had tickets for sale, he took buyers’ money, and never produced the tickets. But in at least one case, a victim asked for proof that the tickets were real, and Mahtami sent a photo of his driver’s license along with a picture of the alleged tickets. Not a sophisticated criminal.
Mahtami took the cash he earned through crime and funneled it all into online sports gambling websites. Mahtami, 28, quickly pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 15 months in prison. I asked McCaffrey if he thought Mahtami was an addict.
“I can’t say he’s an addict,” he answered. “I’m not medically credentialed to make that call, but any money that this guy was getting from this scam, he was pushing back into Fan Duel and Draft Kings.”
I’m not a doctor, either. But I am worried we’re going to hear a lot more scandals like this as sports gambling takes hold of our national pastimes. And it’s past time we have a serious conversation about online sports addiction other than the conveniently dismissive “Well, people get addicted to alcohol, too.”
The rise of online sports betting has been truly meteoric; we’ve hardly had time to adjust
Since a 2018 Supreme Court case cleared the way, 38 states have made online sports betting legal. Total wages increased from $4.9 billion in 2017 to $121.1 billion in 2023, according to The Journal of American Medicine.
Adoption has been quickest among young men, not surprisingly — Sienna University has found that 48% of men 18-49 have an account with at least one online sportsbook. There isn’t great research yet on rates of addiction, but there are plenty of warning signs. According to VCU Health, the number of people calling Virginia’s problem gambling helpline tripled from 2019-2024. And there’s been a 1,500% increase in total calls. There are far more callers, and they are calling far more often.
Meanwhile, in that Sienna survey, participants revealed signs of problems: 52% have ‘chased’ a bet, 37% have felt ashamed after losing, and 20% say their gambling losses came with serious financial implications. Nearly 10% said they’d called a hotline or taken other steps to control problem gambling.
I’m not saying that one criminal’s story about stealing to feed an online gambling addiction should force states to change their gambling laws. There is widespread support for legalized sports betting — we all know it’ll just go underground if it were to be banned again. Might as well buy a few school textbooks with the tax receipts. But there is also widespread support for regulating the industry, and there will soon be support for funding gambling addiction programs, as more of us come to know someone with a problem.
But let’s cut to the chase — smartphone apps are addictive, and developers know it. We know this from research leaked by Frances Haugen, formerly of Facebook. Combine the addictive power of apps with the addictive power of gambling and you’ve got a really nasty combination. VCU Health offers just one example of how that’s abused:
“These apps track your play patterns and learn the best time to prompt you to play more. So even when you try to take a break from gambling, the apps may give you a $10 bonus to entice you to come back. Now with improvements in artificial intelligence, we will likely see even more strategies for getting people to gamble more. ”
Meanwhile, efforts to help people with gambling problems can be described, politely, as token. There’s that 1-second tagline at the end of the flashy ad. My favorite sports radio station airs non-stop sports gambling ads, then a half-hour addiction show on Saturday mornings.
Much, much more has to be done. It would be foolish to wait for an epidemic of Emmanuel Clase’s and Terry Rozier’s and Nikhil Mahtani’s before taking swift action.
Meanwhile, if you notice someone you care about with their heads stuffed in their phones at a bar, yelling at random dropped passes, engaging in big mood swings, maybe even directly expressing regret about a recent bet, offer to chat about it. A lot of people are struggling with online gambling right now.
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