Mass. sportsbooks took $11.8 million in unauthorized bets on Filipino basketball league

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.

Many of the "noncompliance matters" the commission reviews deal with violations of the provision of law that bans wagers on most events involving Massachusetts colleges and universities, and some have led to fines on operators. The commission in July hit DraftKings with the largest fine imposed on a sports betting company yet, penalizing the company $450,000 for flagrant violations of the state law that prohibits the use of credit card funds for wagering.

The unauthorized bets on the Maharlika Pilipinas Basketball League first came to public light in mid-July, when commissioners were informed that Fanatics had taken more than 13,000 bets worth about $713,000 on the games between July 2024 and April 2025. In mid-August, commissioners were told that FanDuel had taken almost 63,000 bets worth $3.25 million on MPBL games between June 2024 and April 2025, and that DraftKings had taken more than 151,500 bets worth about $7.5 million on MPBL games from March 2023 until April 2025.

On Thursday, a commission lawyer said Caesars accepted 1,897 wagers worth a total stake of $307,359.71 on games in the MPBL from the start of legal online betting in March 2023 through March 21, 2025.

Diandra Franks, enforcement counsel for the commission, said the the unauthorized MPBL betting "was discovered by our Sports Wagering Division after it came to its attention that this basketball league is not a FIBA- or an International Basketball Federation-sanctioned league, or otherwise permissible in the Massachusetts catalog."

Questions about the integrity of MPBL games have lingered for years. An ESPN report from 2019 said that Pacquiao had partnered with experts to identify and root out any alleged game-fixing.

"I want to take care of the MPBL. You can't fool the people. The games have to be competitive, without any 'hocus-pocus.' I don't want anyone fooling the Filipino people and I am warning everyone, (if you involve yourself in game-fixing), you might just disappear (from the league)," the outlet quoted Pacquiao as saying.

In 2021, the Department of Justice in the Philippines reportedly found probable cause to seek charges against 17 people alleged to have been involved in game-fixing during the league championship in 2019. And the outlet Sports Interactive Network Philippines reported in 2024 that the MPBL had banned 47 players and team officials alleged to have been involved in game-fixing schemes.

Some other of the illegal bets have involved the commission's explicit prohibition on betting on "any sports or sporting event overseen by Russian or Belarusian governing bodies, leagues, events and players."

Commission lawyers on Thursday also told regulators about an issue involving Fanatics, which the commission said took more than $1,800 in action on the July 26 Petr Yan vs. Marcus McGhee UFC fight "in contravention of ... [the] prohibition on wagers placed on an individual known to represent or promote Russia."

Yan is a Russian fighter and another commission lawyer, Nathaniel Kennedy, said there have been at least two other instances in which bets were accepted on events involving Yan.