A sprawling betting scheme to rig NCAA and Chinese Basketball Association games has led to charges against 26 people, including more than a dozen college basketball players who tried to fix games as recently as last season, federal prosecutors said on Thursday.
The scheme generally revolved around fixers recruiting players with the promise of a big payment in exchange for those players purposefully underperforming during a game, prosecutors said. The fixers then placed large bets against those players’ teams, defrauding sportsbooks and other bettors, according to the indictment unsealed on Thursday.
Fixers started with two games in the Chinese Basketball Association in 2023 and, after being successful there, moved on to fix 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.
Four of the players charged – Simeon Cottle, Carlos Hart, Oumar Koureissi and Camian Shell – played for their current teams in the last few days, although the allegations against them do not involve this season.
Calling the scheme an “international criminal conspiracy,” US Attorney David Metcalf told reporters in Philadelphia that the case represents a “significant corruption of the integrity of sports.”
Concerns about gambling and college sports have grown since 2018, when the US supreme court struck down a federal ban on the practice, leading some states to legalize betting to varying degrees. The NCAA does not allow athletes or staff to bet on college games, but it briefly allowed student-athletes to bet on professional sports last year before rescinding that decision in November. Of the defendants, 15 played basketball for Division I NCAA schools during the 2024-25 season, prosecutors say. Several of them are playing this season.
Five others last played in the NCAA in the 2023-24 season while another, former NBA player Antonio Blakeney, played in the Chinese Basketball Association in the 2022-23 season.
The other five defendants were described by authorities as fixers. They include two men who prosecutors say worked in the training and development of basketball players. Another was a trainer and former coach, one was a former NCAA player and two were described as gamblers, influencers and sports handicappers.
In many instances, the defendants’ wagers on the fixed games were successful. The sportsbooks paid out the winnings, and took losses, authorities say.
“The sportsbooks would not 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 would not have placed those bets had they known about it, authorities say.
The charges, filed in federal court in Philadelphia, include bribery, wire fraud and conspiracy.
“Protecting competition integrity is of the utmost importance for the NCAA. We are thankful for law enforcement agencies working to detect and combat integrity issues and match manipulation in college sports,” said NCAA president Charlie Baker in a statement on Thursday.
“The pattern of college basketball game integrity conduct revealed by law enforcement today is not entirely new information to the NCAA. Through helpful collaboration and with industry regulators, we have finished or have open investigations into almost all of the teams in today’s indictment.”
One betting scandal after another has rocked the sports world, where gambling revenue topped $11bn for the first three-quarters of last year in the US, according to the American Gaming Association. That’s up more than 13% from the prior year, the group said.
The indictment follows a series of NCAA investigations that led to at least 10 players receiving lifetime bans for bets that sometimes involved their own teams and their own performances. And the NCAA has said that at least 30 players have been investigated over gambling allegations. More than 30 people were also charged in last year’s sprawling federal takedown of illegal gambling operations linked to professional basketball.
