EY Report: Professional Athletes Lost Nearly $1bn to Fraud Over Two Decades as Sports Revenue Hits Records

Professional athletes lost nearly $1bn to alleged fraud from 2004 to 2024 according to an EY report that identified accelerating losses in recent years. The EY report stated that as the sports industry reaches record revenue levels the financial incentives to steal from athletes and profit illicitly has never been higher.

The playbook for fraudsters and organised crime is growing more complex every year and the risks have multiplied at every level of sport.

Athletes today are confronted with an expanding array of threats as perpetrators continually devise new ways to exploit their trust and relationships the EY report added. These risks include traditional schemes such as embezzlement identity theft and misappropriation of earnings as well as newer forms tied to sports betting fraud and unauthorised use of NIL rights.

College athletes have been allowed to monetise their NIL rights since 2021 creating further financial incentive to share personal lives on social media.

Ippei Mizuhara was sentenced to 57 months in federal prison in 2025 for stealing about $17m from Shohei Ohtani’s bank accounts to repay gambling debts. Darryl Cohen was convicted in New York in March 2026 of defrauding three NBA players out of more than $5m between approximately 2017 and 2020.

Cohen persuaded NBA players Chandler Parsons Courtney Lee and Jrue Holiday to buy life insurance policies at enormous mark-ups and made unauthorised money transfers from the players that were purportedly donations to a non-profit organisation but were used to build a state-of-the-art athletic gym in the back yard of his home.

A former Alabama player allegedly impersonated NFL players Penix Njoku and McKinney in a $20m loan scam. Kwamaine Jerell Ford was convicted of computer fraud and aggravated identity theft in Georgia in 2019 for hacking into more than 100 Apple accounts belonging to collegiate and professional athletes and rappers.

Ford was ordered in March 2026 to be held without bail pending trial on charges of fraud identity theft and sex trafficking.

In March the NFL Players Association informed agents that unnamed NFL and NBA players had been targeted in a phishing scheme allegedly perpetrated by Kwamaine Jerell Ford posing as a female adult film star. The Guardian reported that Ford allegedly posed as adult film star Teanna Trump and as an Apple customer support representative in a phishing scam targeting athletes while in federal custody.

Once in control of accounts Ford allegedly embarked on a spending spree and in 2021 allegedly posed as the adult film star to recruit trick and coerce a female victim into engaging in commercial sex acts with professional athletes based on false promises that the film star would advance the victim’s modelling career.

Sensitive records were leaked in a hack of a single US company in 2024. At least 70 percent of surveyed British sports organisations had suffered at least one cyber-related breach or incident according to research published by the UK National Cyber Security Centre in 2020.

The rate of cyber-related breaches or incidents among British sports organisations in 2020 was more than twice the rate at which general UK businesses were targeted.

The NBA’s Houston Rockets were the targets of a ransomware attack in 2021. The NFL’s San Francisco 49ers were the targets of a ransomware attack in 2022. Americans reported more than $20bn in cybercrime losses last year according to the FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center latest annual report a 26 percent increase from 2024.

An unnamed professional basketball player was the object of a cyber-attack in which criminals embedded malware into popular online games played by his children. The malware created a backdoor into the basketball player’s home network after his children downloaded infected game updates according to BlackCloak.

An NFL player had home security cameras professionally installed but without adequate password and firewall protection.

Security firms and law enforcement agencies are warning that fans are at significant risk of becoming fraud victims for this summer’s World Cup. Raheem Sterling returned from Qatar and missed a match at the 2022 World Cup after armed intruders broke into his property near London.

The NFL Players Association provides players with access to third-party support to help them address cybercrime problems such as identity theft.

“The targeting of high-profile high net worth individuals is at a massive all-time high” said Chris Pierson founder and CEO of BlackCloak. The Guardian reported that media attention readily available biographical information and weak privacy protections in the US mean that anyone can quickly find personal details on almost any American collegiate or professional athlete including photographs date and place of birth and social security numbers often acquired from massive data breaches.