politics
EY Report: Professional Athletes Lost Nearly $1bn to Fraud Over Two Decades as Sports Revenue Hits Records
EY report tallies nearly $1bn in alleged losses by professional athletes over two decades while FBI data shows Americans reported more than $20bn in cybercrime losses last year. Recent convictions include Ippei Mizuhara’s 57-month sentence for stealing $17m from Shohei Ohtani and Darryl Cohen’s fraud conviction involving three NBA players.
May 15, 5:00 AM·3m read1 source
The GuardianAudio version
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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.
