Fanatics Sportsbook Teams with IC360 and Signify Group to Tackle Athlete Abuse Through the Bad Actor Program
Fanatics becomes the first legal sports betting member of a new industry network built to identify and bar abusive bettors from wagering.
Fanatics Sportsbook has partnered with Integrity Compliance 360 (IC360) and Signify Group to launch the Bad Actor Program, a monitoring system designed to detect and punish bettors who abuse or threaten athletes, coaches, and officials on social media. The programme begins at the start of the football season and gives sportsbooks a route to restrict wagering by individuals behind threatening accounts. Fanatics is the first legal operator to sign on.
How the Bad Actor Program Detects Online Abuse
The mechanics are where this gets interesting. IC360 will work with Signify Group’s Threat Matrix service to scan multiple platforms for targeted abusive and threatening content. When abuse or threats aimed at athletes, teams, or organisations are picked up on open source social media, the accounts behind them get logged into IC360’s ProhiBet Bad Actor platform. That platform mirrors IC360’s existing ProhiBet tool, which already helps restrict wagering by athletes, coaches, and trainers. Only now the restriction points the other way, at the bettors doing the threatening.
Monitoring spans X, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube. It covers public-facing activity targeting individual athletes and coaches, and it captures both direct abuse and the messier indirect kind: reply threads, reposts, and wider fan discourse. Athletes and officials can also report abusive direct messages straight to Threat Matrix. Signify then assesses severity, escalates serious cases to in-house specialists, and where conduct appears to cross criminal thresholds, compiles evidence packs for referral to law enforcement.
What the Fanatics Sportsbook Bad Actor Program Means for Operators
For operators, this is the part worth reading twice. Fanatics has committed to suspending or permanently terminating any customer found to have engaged in abusive, threatening, defamatory, or harassing conduct toward sports officials, coaches, or athletes. The company already runs a zero-tolerance policy. The Bad Actor Program extends it by producing evidence-based reports and a shared list of names that can circulate among participating operators.
That shared list is the strategic core. A single sportsbook banning a bad actor is a closed loop. A cross-operator network where one identification can lock someone out across multiple books is a deterrent with actual teeth. The programme also feeds intelligence and evidence to sports leagues and teams, letting them pursue their own enforcement with Threat Matrix support.
Matt King, CEO of Fanatics Betting and Gaming, framed it around the company’s values of respect and tolerance for athletes and coaches, and openly called on other operators to join. Read past the statement and the signal is clear: Fanatics wants this to become an industry standard, not a solo policy. A network only works at scale.
Why the Sports Betting Industry Is Acting Now
The timing tracks with a real problem. Scott Sadin, Co-CEO of IC360, pointed to threats and harassment in arenas and on social media rising at an alarming rate and undermining the integrity of the sports betting industry. Signify CEO Jonathan Hirshler noted that many of the firm’s global sports clients have spent the past few years calling on betting and gaming operators to confront the issue directly. The subtext is that abuse and gambling losses have become uncomfortably linked, and leagues have been waiting for the betting side to respond.
Signify, positioned as the leading provider of social media protection to global sports, brings the detection muscle. IC360 brings the betting-side enforcement infrastructure. Together they describe this as the first industry network built to identify, alert, and prevent bad actors from creating accounts or placing wagers.
Future Outlook for the Bad Actor Program
The next six to twelve months will test whether this stays a Fanatics initiative or becomes an industry framework. The shared-list model only delivers its full deterrent value once rival operators join, so watch for the second and third signatories. Expect leagues and teams to lean in too, given Signify already serves governing bodies worldwide and now has a betting-side channel for enforcement. The open question is consistency: how operators define the abuse threshold, how appeals are handled, and how a shared blocklist holds up against fairness and data concerns. Get that right and this becomes a template. Get it wrong and it stalls at one member.
Whether the rest of the industry follows Fanatics or waits to see how it plays out will say a lot about how seriously legal sports betting takes its responsibility to the athletes it profits from.
Source: IC360
