A sprawling betting scheme to rig NCAA and Chinese Basketball Association games ensnared 26 people, including greater than a dozen college basketball players who tried to repair games as recently as last season, federal prosecutors said Thursday.
The scheme generally revolved around fixers recruiting players with the promise of a giant payment in exchange for those players purposefully underperforming during a game, prosecutors said. Then the fixers placed big bets against those players’ teams in those games, defrauding sportsbooks and other bettors, in line with the indictment unsealed Thursday.
Fixers began with two games within the Chinese Basketball Association in 2023 and, successful there, moved on to fixing NCAA games as recently as January 2025, authorities say. The “bribe payments” to players ranged from $10,000 to $30,000 per game, authorities said.
4 of the players charged — Simeon Cottle, Carlos Hart, Oumar Koureissi and Camian Shell — played for his or her current teams in the previous few days, although the allegations against them don’t involve this season.
Calling it an “international criminal conspiracy,” U.S. Attorney David Metcalf told reporters in Philadelphia that this case represents a “significant corruption of the integrity of sports.”
Concerns about gambling and college sports have grown since 2018, when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a federal ban on the practice, leading some states to legalize it to various degrees. The NCAA doesn’t allow athletes or staff to bet on college games, but it surely briefly allowed student-athletes to bet on skilled sports last 12 months before rescinding that call in November.
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Of the defendants, 15 played basketball for Division 1 NCAA schools during 2024-25 season, prosecutors say. Several of them are playing this season.
Five others last played within the NCAA within the 2023-24 season while one other, former NBA player Antonio Blakeney, played within the Chinese Basketball Association within the 2022-23 season.
The opposite five defendants were described by authorities as fixers.
They include two men who prosecutors say worked within the training and development of basketball players. One other was a trainer and former coach, one was a former NCAA player and two were described as gamblers, influencers and sports handicappers.
In lots of instances, the defendants’ wagers on the fixed games were successful. The sportsbooks paid out the winnings, and took losses, authorities say.
“The sportsbooks wouldn’t have paid out those wagers had they known that the defendants fixed those games,” the indictment said.
Meanwhile, other bettors unaware of the scheme lost money on their bets and wouldn’t have placed those bets had they known about it, authorities say.
The costs, filed in federal court in Philadelphia, include bribery, wire fraud and conspiracy.
One betting scandal after one other has rocked the sports world, where gambling revenue topped $11 billion for the primary three-quarters of last 12 months, in line with the American Gaming Association. That’s up greater than 13 per cent from the prior 12 months, the group said.
The indictment follows a series of NCAA investigations that led to at the very least 10 players receiving lifetime bans this 12 months for bets that sometimes involved their very own teams and their very own performances. And the NCAA has said that at the very least 30 players have been investigated over gambling allegations. Greater than 30 people were also charged in last 12 months’s sprawling federal takedown of illegal gambling operations linked to skilled basketball.
© 2026 The Canadian Press