In many ways, the sports betting scandal that resulted in Toronto Raptors big man Jontay Porter getting banned for life by the NBA was a sign that the legal market is doing its job. Suspicious bets were made and swiftly flagged, and a league investigation quickly determined Porter had used a friend’s online account to bet on NBA games after permissibly doing so through his own FanDuel account prior to signing a two-way deal with Toronto.

But talk to some gambling integrity professionals and they’ll tell you that there’s emerging technology that may have prevented the suspicious wagers from happening in the first place.

“There are tools that can be used to help prevent these instances and events from occurring,” Tom Hill, director of digital identity and head of sports betting and iGaming at Prove Identity, told Sports Handle. “We are working on an initiative with our partners and customers in the space around these exact issues — how would you manage this dynamic roster of names? What I see is a really positive movement toward the operators working together.”

And just what are these tools? Perhaps the best-known is ProhiBet, a product rolled out by the recently merged U.S. Integrity and Odds On Compliance — now known as Integrity Compliance 360, or IC360 — that helps professional and college teams and leagues cast a net to catch players who may be violating wagering policies. And newer to the marketplace is Texas-based GambleID’s Athlete Response Monitoring (ARM) system, which not only tracks betting-related activity among athletes, but also their circle of acquaintances.

“Take Joe Burrow, for example,” GambleID founder JD Garner told Sports Handle in December. “It’s pretty easy to find out who his college roommate is or his fraternity brothers. … Everyone is mapped these days, so we look to see who is following them, follow-backs, Facebook friends, who they made a shoutout to.

“We’re very confident that we would be able to stop someone from betting before they do. We feel very confident that we can tell where they are. When we have that team’s participation, we can nail it down.”

Never an ‘I gotcha’

Garner’s right-hand man at GambleID, his son Tres, echoed his father’s sentiments in an interview with Sports Handle last week. Tres said GambleID recently met with the NBA and plans to do so again in the wake of the Porter imbroglio.

“The whole approach of this product is never an ‘I gotcha,’” Tres said of ARM. “Let’s pretend we had been able to implement and integrate with the NBA and their partners. We can backlog data on past activity. We could have started to catch these sort of things and are 100% confident we would have seen some irregularities. At the very least, whenever partners like U.S. Integrity started to investigate, we would have had a live log of Porter’s activity and had flags on all of those parties (i.e., people in his sphere of influence).”

Tres said GambleID has “met with every major [sporting] league” and recently had “a really terrific meeting” in Indianapolis with the NCAA about potentially implementing the ARM technology.

“The approach of our current product is to get as many operators as we can working on this thing,” he said. “But because there’s a specific athlete angle to this product, it’s about getting in front of leagues.”