(New York) A fourth American has gone to court to be charged with sports betting fraud with the alleged complicity of a professional NBA basketball player during two games this year, New York federal prosecutors said on Friday .
The public prosecutor’s office in Brooklyn, the eastern borough of New York, announced Thursday the indictment of three Americans for fraud, a fourth having his name redacted from the indictment.
Justice republished this document on Friday with the name of the 4e indicted.
“Ammar Awawdeh, Timothy McCormack, Mahmud Mollah, Long Phi Pham, aka “Bruce”, and others, knowingly conspired to devise a plan to deceive and defraud an online sports betting company,” according to the prosecution, which is based on an investigation by the federal police (FBI).
The bettors are suspected of having benefited from the complicity of an anonymized American NBA basketball player known as “player 1”.
According to the specialized press, it is Jontay Porter of the Toronto Raptors.
AFP confirmed this by cross-referencing information from the courts, game statistics and the NBA’s internal investigation regarding two matches on January 26 and March 20.
In April, the North American professional basketball league banned Jontay Porter for life for around ten suspected rigged sports bets and NBA boss Adam Silver invoked the internationally renowned “integrity of the competition”.
With the alleged complicity of Jontay Porter, the four American bettors are accused of having won tens of thousands of dollars – even 1.1 million for one of the four – knowing in advance that the basketball player would ask to leave the field for health reasons although he was fit in previous matches.
The FBI, alerted by online betting companies, analyzed messages and money movements between punters on their mobile phones.
Timothy McCormack and Mahmud Mollah were released on bail on Thursday. Long Phi Pham was arrested on Monday at New York’s JFK airport on his way to Australia with a sum of cash.
Jontay Porter is a modest NBA player, playing in just 37 games between the 2020-2021 and 2023-2024 seasons. He is the younger brother of Michael Porter Jr., an important player for defending champion Denver.
A majority of US states have legalized sports betting since a 2018 Supreme Court ruling.