US prosecutors charged 26 people for allegedly participating in an international basketball match-fixing scheme, the latest in a number of such scandals since the country legalized sports betting.
More than a dozen US college basketball players are accused of taking part in the fraud, which also involved gambling on China’s professional basketball league. The case represented a “significant corruption of the integrity of sports,” a US attorney said.
Concerns about match fixing have grown since the US Supreme Court struck down a federal ban on sports betting in 2018: An NBC News poll last year showed that 70% of respondents feared sports gambling “lessens the integrity of the game,” with many fearing that betting could lead to match rigging.