After violating the NBA’s gambling rules, Jontay Porter has been banned from the NBA for a lifetime. Porter is the first player banned from the NBA; the only other person was Donald Sterling, the owner of the LA Clippers after racist recordings came out.
In the case of Jontay Porter, the situation was about him gambling against himself or his own team. The investigation started when bookmakers recognized weird patterns involving Porter’s performance in a game. The accusation was that Porter told third-party bettors that he would go under the expected numbers in a game. The third-party bettor placed a $80,000 bet that Porter would go under the anticipated numbers for online betting. The expected return for the ticket was $1,1 million.
That bet got frozen and never paid out as the NBA started an investigation against Port. What is interesting is that Porter played only 3 minutes in that game due to not feeling well, and of course, all of his numbers were under what was expected by bookies.
There were also other bets where Porter placed bets from another person’s account, betting on his team (the Raptors) to lose, and they lost three out of three times he placed that bet. He was not involved in these games.
Recently, a poker player named Long Phi Pham was arrested and, after interrogation, admitted that he and others were involved with Porter fixing games and that they made a profit of over $1 million.
PokerNews received documents saying that Pham, Ammar Awawdeh, Mahmud Mollah, and Timothy McCormack “did knowingly and intentionally conspire to devise a scheme and artifice to defraud an online sports betting company.”
There were messages from Telegram that got into the hands of the FBI, in which three suspects and Porter made a plan for Porter to leave the game, faking he was not feeling well. There was also footage from the Atlantic City casino and a selfie one of the suspects took, in which three of them were at the restaurant the same day when the suspect’s bet was placed.
One of the suspects (Long Phi Pham) was stopped by police at JFK airport, where he had a one-way fight booked and was about to leave for Australia. Pham was in possession of $12,000 cash, $80,000 cashier’s check, three cell phones, and betting tickets. Pham could face up to 20 years in prison.
After being banned for a lifetime by the NBA, Porter will be in court and could face up to four years in prison.
