Fanatics Sportsbook to Identify and Punish Bettors for Abusing Athletes Online

Fanatics Sportsbook announced a partnership with Integrity Compliance 360 to use its ProhiBet Bad Actor product to identify customers sending threatening messages to game participants. Beginning with the football season, users found to have engaged in social media abuse on X, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and YouTube could see their Fanatics Sportsbook accounts suspended or banned. The Bad Actor Program, developed with data firm Signify Group, is described as the first industry network designed to identify, alert and prevent bad actors from creating accounts or placing wagers. An NCAA study found that 46 percent of men's basketball players reported being abused on social media by bettors who wagered on their games. Fanatics is the first member of the initiative, with the companies hoping to welcome other operators.

Operator-level sanctions create a financial disincentive for bettor harassment after the abuse has been posted publicly, but athletes continue to receive direct messages containing threats, coercion and sexually explicit material sent to personal accounts where no sportsbook monitoring exists. Guardii closes this gap with a detection module purpose-built to protect athletes from abuse patterns linked to betting outcomes, identifying sustained targeting, escalation and coercive language in direct-message conversations before the exchange progresses to threats or blackmail. The platform blocks hostile contact at the point of entry, surfaces an athlete in acute distress to their management or safeguarding officer, and enables rapid escalation to law enforcement when threat thresholds are crossed, creating a protective layer that operates independently of any individual platform or operator enforcement policy.