PORTLAND Ore. (KPTV) - The illegal gambling case alleging Portland Trail Blazers head coach Chauncey Billups’ involvement in a [multimillion-dollar cheating scheme](https://www.kptv.com/2025/10/23/portland-trail-blazers-head-coach-chauncey-billups-arrested-sports-betting-probe-ap-source-says/) is raising new questions about the integrity of professional sports and the future of legalized betting.
Billups faces federal charges of wire fraud and money laundering. Prosecutors accuse him of participating in rigged poker games that used hidden cameras, marked cards and modified shufflers to cheat players out of roughly $7 million.
In a statement sent Thursday, Billups’ attorney, Chris Heywood, defended his client:
“Anyone who knows Chauncey Billups knows he is a man of integrity; men of integrity do not cheat and defraud others. To believe that Chauncey Billups did what the federal government is accusing him of is to believe that he would risk his hall-of-fame legacy, his reputation and his freedom. He would not jeopardize those things for anything, let alone a card game,” he said in part.
With the explosion of sports gambling in the United States in recent years, University of Oregon Associate Professor of Law David Weber said alleged schemes on this scale are not surprising.
Weber, who serves as faculty director of the university’s Sports Law Program and has participated in multiple panels on sports gambling, said advances in technology are making these cases easier for prosecutors to track and prove.
Prosecuting sports gambling cases has become more straightforward as legalized online betting gathers large amounts of trackable data, allowing investigators to identify and flag unusual patterns.
“One of the things that they’re looking at are unusual betting practices or swings. In the past, we might have seen more bets placed around the ultimate outcome of a game — who’s going to win or lose. Now we see just as many, if not more, prop bets or side bets. And these are much more easily manipulable by the athletes,” Weber said.
He added that the technology used to facilitate gambling often evolves alongside enforcement and oversight efforts.
“I think the type of technology used goes hand in hand with the increased enforcement and oversight,” Weber said. “As we see more and more oversight on athletes’ phones themselves, we’re going to see the use of third parties, maybe different messaging apps, as they try to get that information out.”
Sports leagues across the country have adopted strict rules regarding sports-related gambling. Most major professional sports leagues prohibit athletes, coaches and staff from betting on their own sport, though policies vary on betting on other sports.
Weber noted that sports leagues market themselves on integrity, but that image is now being tested as high-profile figures face gambling-related allegations.
“People always say and question, why are these professional athletes or these people on these professional teams doing this? They’re already making so much money,” Weber said. “I think it typically comes down to common factors, either the money is just too easy and too quick to pass up, or there’s some personal circumstance going on where they need access to quick money.”
As for legislative changes, Weber doesn’t expect major shifts in state law. However, he said lawmakers could consider limits on prop or side bets, which he says are easily manipulated by athletes at both the collegiate and professional levels.
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