Point Shaving in the NBA and NCAA: How to Make Millions on Game Leaks

Point shading is one of the most murky and criminal ways to get rich in sports, which usually remains somewhere on the periphery of big sports. But in 2025, it was this term that flew back to the front pages: thanks to Johntay Porter, an NBA player, and his "partner" - illegal bettor Schenk Hannen, a huge scam was revealed, involving even the top NCAA student teams.

What is Point Shaving?

In short: point shading is when a professional athlete deliberately plays worse than he can in order to "adjust" the final result to the desired stakes. This is not just a loss or an unsuccessful game, but a real loss for the sake of money. For such services, large bettors give athletes a percentage of their winnings. All this is absolutely illegal, punishable by criminality, disqualification and denunciation of the entire industry.

In major leagues like the NBA, point shading is rare: the payouts for fair play are too high to risk your career for dirty schemes. But there were also those who decided to circumvent the rules for the sake of quick profit.

How Porter and Hannen's scheme worked

While everyone thought that such scams were a thing of the past, Schenk Hännen showed that if you are brazen and cunning, you can squeeze millions out of "underplays". Bookmakers in the United States often poorly monitor such maneuvers, but Hannen and Porter took advantage of this for almost a year and a half.

It all started with Porter's suspiciously passive starts in NBA games: he was regularly "extinguished" on the court literally from the first minutes, after which he quickly left the game under the pretext of injury or poor health. But the feds got the real bombshell after a warrant for access to his correspondence - there were clear instructions:

"No blocked shots, no interceptions. I'll go out for a couple of minutes, then I'll say that my eye hurts."

Based on these "instructions", Hannen and his team bet large sums on exact outcomes - how many points, rebounds, blocked shots, minutes on the floor. Naturally, all bets came in the first time, because the player himself controlled the result.

How the scheme was revealed

It smelled hot when bookmakers noticed anomalies not only in the NBA, but also at the student level - among NCAA players. Porter in one of the matches "Clippers" played exactly as promised in the messages: he came out for a couple of minutes, did not score points, did not show anything and left, "hiding" behind an eye injury. The money settled in the accounts of betters.

The investigation quickly reached the federal structures. In January 2025, Schenk Hannen was detained at the Las Vegas airport with a hundred thousand dollars in cash, a ticket to Colombia and a cell phone that contained all the evidence of the scheme. Thanks to the correspondence, it became clear that at least 8 NCAA teams were involved in the fraud, and some players simply lost matches for specific bets.

Implications for NCAA and NBA

The scandal that uncovered drove the NCAA into crisis: the feds drained entire teams from tournaments (Temple, Eastern Michigan), regulators are breathing down the neck of everyone who could be involved. The trial is underway, and the investigation has a chance to bury several quarries at once. Hannen faces terms under the article for organising a criminal conspiracy and money laundering, and Porter is banned from professional sports for life.

The whole story has proven that even in 2025, greed, thirst for easy money, and weak supervision of bookmakers can give rise to scams on a global scale.