NCAA Increases Efforts to Identify Gambling

It seems like we can hardly go a few weeks without hearing about a gambling scandal in the sports arena. No sport and no position is safe from scandal. Recently, we reported on the latest sports betting scandal to hit Major League Soccer. The NCAA has had more than its share of these scandals and are taking measures they believe will help identify (and hopefully prevent) officials from altering games for betting purposes.

Specifically, the NCAA has upped the level of attention being paid to game officials in basketball, baseball, and softball tournaments. They have employed the services of ProhiBet, a technology by Integrity Compliance 360 (IC360) that crosschecks anonymized identification data with sportsbooks to flag impermissible bettors.

Mark Hicks, the NCAA’s managing director of enforcement, said “Implementing ProhiBet is a major step in increasing integrity protections for college sports. This platform adds another layer to the NCAA’s robust integrity monitoring program as we work to keep competition integrity and student-athlete well-being paramount in a rapidly evolving sports betting environment.”

Essentially, all 220+ officials of these events undergo a background check, and their information is loaded into a database. The program then cross-references the names with sports betting accounts (from participating sportsbook) it also has on file. Two dozen U.S. based sportsbooks are working with Prohibet at this time. This is the first year this technology will be implemented to catch officials who may be betting on sports and ultimately the goal is to prevent this sort of activity altogether.

If all goes as planned and the NCAA is happy with the service, expect them to roll this out for regular season games which include other sports such as football, their biggest attraction and the sport which receives most bets.