Why are so many athletes getting caught betting? Because the system is working

Dan Wetzel, Yahoo!Sports

Anytime anyone — NFL Pro or Average Joe — logs into a sports betting app, his location is immediately available on a dashboard for integrity analysts to view.

How pinpoint is the placement?

“A 3-foot radius,” said Matt Holt, founder and CEO of U.S. Integrity, which has partnered with nearly every major sports organization and sports book in North America to monitor for any irregularities up to and including fraud, point-shaving or game-fixing.

Essentially, they don’t just know who you are but where you are. It means if an athlete logs in while at a team facility — which the NFL prohibits even if they are betting on another sport — they will be almost instantly caught.

Or if, say, a referee uses a friend’s account to log in from the pregame dressing room, questions arise because the friend isn’t a ref and thus wouldn’t be in that locker room.

Global positioning is just one of myriad tools US Integrity and other companies have at their disposal these days. There is real-time wagering data and trends. There are advanced analytic programs that can instantly detect even the slightest variation from the norm, both in the aggregate and the individual. There are intense social media monitoring systems.

“Anything of a nefarious, suspicious or unexpected activity, we send out an alert,” Holt said. “We are catching people at a higher percentage than anytime in the history of sports wagering in North America.”

The headlines are proving that.

The NFL suspended five players earlier this spring for between six games and an entire season. In the shorter-suspension cases, global position proved they had wagered on non-NFL games at the team facility.

College baseball saw Alabama’s head coach fired and Cincinnati’s step down in a scandal that began because unexpected betting occurred in Ohio on an SEC baseball game played in Louisiana.

In Iowa, 41 college athletes from at least five different sports at Iowa and Iowa State are under investigation.

And just this week, Indianapolis Colts cornerback Isaiah Rodgers acknowledged he had “made mistakes” and was under investigation by the NFL for sports wagering. Per ESPN, it was discovered as many as 100 bets — mostly between $25 and $50 — were placed on NFL games, including the Colts, through the account of an acquaintance.

That’s how dialed in the monitoring industry is.

Rest is here…