CLEVELAND — The NCAA and Venmo are partnering in an effort to curb harassment of student athletes when it comes to sports betting. The payment app wants to make it harder for frustrated bettors to personally target student athletes through their site.
"We've been seeing athletes say things like, after they've had a bad game they’ve reported getting requests from people looking for money,” said Geoff Zochodne, a sports betting analyst with Covers.com. “Presumably bettors, who feel like they lost a bet because of this athlete."
Among the protections will be things like a guide of best practices for the athletes to protect themselves, a hotline to report any abuse and a monitoring of student athletes' accounts, especially those involved in big plays that could impact the betting lines.
“Those really exciting things that happen in college athletics, whether that be a final kick that gets made or not made or a final 3-point shot that goes in or doesn’t, unfortunately, those are trigger points that may cause some sort of harassment,” said Clint Hangerbrauck, NCAA Managing Director of Enterprise Risk Management.
“With us working with the team over at Venmo we'll be able to identify some of those trigger moments and proactively put that digital shield around the student athlete to protect them from unwanted harassment,” he said.
Violators could be banned from Venmo. The NCAA said they are constantly looking for ways to protect student-athletes in this evolving marketplace and applauded the Buckeye State for leading the way by banning college prop bets and banning sports bettors who harass college athletes.
"Kind of kudos to the state of Ohio for being trailblazers in how to put appropriate protections around the sports betting marketplace to prevent harassment and other integrity issues that may arise,” said Hangerbrauck.
In a statement, NCAA President Charlie Baker said, “The harassment we are seeing across various online platforms is unacceptable, and we need fans to do better. We applaud Venmo for taking action, and we need more social media companies and online platforms to do the same. Several states have passed laws to crack down on this behavior to protect student-athletes, and we hope more do the same because stopping this abuse requires action on multiple fronts.”
David Szuchman, SVP, Head of Global Financial Crime and Customer Protection, PayPal, added, “While unwanted interactions to athletes make up an extremely small percentage of transactions on Venmo, even a small number of these incidents is unacceptable. The safety and security of our users remain our highest priority.
“Harassment or abuse of any kind is not tolerated on the platform, and strict action is taken against users who violate our policies. Through these measures, we are taking decisive steps to help prevent the misuse of our platform and ensure all our users feel protected when they use Venmo,” he said.
