For more than two years, some sports betting companies allowed people in Massachusetts to wager on games of a professional basketball league in the Philippines that has been dogged by game-fixing allegations and has not been approved for wagering by state regulators, taking nearly $11.8 million in unauthorized action.
The Massachusetts Gaming Commission was briefed Thursday on at least the fourth instance in which a sportsbook was found to be taking bets on the unauthorized Maharlika Pilipinas Basketball League.
Since mid-July, commission investigators have alerted regulators to 229,301 illegal bets taken on the MPBL by Fanatics, FanDuel, DraftKings and Caesars Sportsbook at various times from the March 2023 launch of legal betting through late April 2025.
The commission has never approved the Maharlika Pilipinas Basketball League, which was founded by former boxing champion Manny Pacquiao in 2017, to be bet on in Massachusetts. In total, bettors put more than $11.76 million on the line in the unauthorized contests.
Commissioners decided to refer all four operators’ violations back to the Investigations and Enforcement Bureau for resolution. The IEB so far this year has assessed a cumulative $65,000 in fines for noncompliance with the catalog of approved events.
Since the Legislature legalized sports wagering in 2022 and the Gaming Commission launched it in 2023, regulators have dealt with chronic instances in which sports betting companies have accepted (and potentially profited from) illegal bets. Within days of legal betting’s start, all three of the state’s sportsbooks had already owned up to accepting bets on games that were not legally permitted, and the issue persists more than two years later in multiple forms.
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