Fanatics and IC360 Build AI Network to Ban Bettors Who Harass Athletes

Fanatics Sportsbook and Integrity Compliance 360 (IC360) launched a shared program on Thursday that uses artificial intelligence to identify bettors who abuse or threaten athletes online, then bans those bettors from placing wagers. Fanatics is the first operator to join what the companies call the Bad Actor Program, described as the first industry network built to flag bad actors and stop them from opening accounts or placing bets. The companies are building it with Signify Group, the data firm that already runs abuse-monitoring work for the NCAA.

The mechanics are concrete. From the start of the football season, IC360 will run Signify's AI-driven Threat Matrix service against public posts on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X, and YouTube. When the system detects abuse or threats aimed at athletes, teams, or organizations, the offending social media accounts get blacklisted on IC360's ProhiBet Bad Actor platform, branded ProhibitBA. Fanatics then suspends or permanently bans any of its customers found to be behind that abuse. Signify analysts also assess the severity of reported cases and escalate the serious ones, including referrals to law enforcement. Athletes are encouraged to report abusive direct messages too, since private messages are harder for monitoring tools to surface than public posts.

The program borrows its model from ProhiBet, the IC360 tool that flags coaches, officials, and other prohibited individuals who should not bet and reports them to sportsbooks for restriction. The Bad Actor Program points that same shared-list machinery at the people sending the threats rather than the people receiving them. IC360 plans to compile evidence-based reports and a names list to circulate among participating legal operators, and to share intelligence with leagues and teams.

The numbers behind the problem

The abuse figures are large and getting attention from regulators. In a February 2026 NCAA survey of Division I athletes, 51% of men's basketball players reported receiving social media abuse tied to their performance, and 46% said they got negative or threatening messages from someone who had bet on their game. The survey, part of the NCAA's SNAP study, drew 7,493 responses from 154 Division I schools and was run with Queensland University of Technology and MIT. One in three men's basketball players reported being directly blamed by fans for betting losses.

Signify's own tournament data shows the scale of the monitoring task. During the 2025 March Madness tournaments, the firm logged more than 1 million posts and comments directed at 2,032 players, 346 coaches, 136 teams, and 269 officials. Its AI flagged 54,096 of those for potential abuse, human analysts confirmed 3,161 as abusive or threatening, Signify investigated 103 accounts, and it referred 10 to law enforcement. That pipeline, from bulk monitoring down to a handful of criminal referrals, is the same one Fanatics is now plugging into on the commercial side.

Why operators have an incentive to join

The program only works at scale if rivals sign up, and Fanatics is saying so out loud. "We encourage other operators to join the initiative because there is no sports betting potential loss that should embolden a sports betting customer to threaten or harass an athlete online," said Fanatics Betting and Gaming CEO Matt King, who argued that a shared ban list stops a barred bettor from simply opening an account at the next sportsbook. IC360 Co-CEO Scott Sadin framed it as a player-safety measure: "Threats of violence and harassment in sports at arenas and on social media are increasing at an alarming rate, undermining the integrity of the sports betting industry."

The cross-operator pitch matters more than the headline because Fanatics alone covers a slice of the market. Fanatics runs in 24 states and held roughly 7.3% of US gross gaming revenue market share as of March 2026, behind FanDuel near 44%, DraftKings near 34%, and BetMGM near 14% (Casino Reports). A ban list that lives only inside the fourth-place book leaves abusers free at the three larger ones. Fanatics has handled this kind of action before in isolation: FanDuel banned a bettor who filmed himself verbally abusing Olympian Gabby Thomas at a track event last year, and BetMGM rolled out a zero-tolerance abuse policy early this year. Those were one-off operator decisions. The Bad Actor Program is an attempt to turn them into a shared integrity infrastructure that follows the bettor across books.

There is a workable precedent for whether monitoring plus enforcement actually moves the numbers. After the NCAA pushed states to ban individual college player prop bets, eighteen states plus Washington, DC restricted them, and Signify recorded a 23% year-over-year drop in betting-related abuse during the 2025 tournaments. Women's-side abuse fell 66% and men's-side abuse fell 36%, and the share of monitored abuse aimed directly at student-athletes dropped from 42% in 2024 to 15% in 2025. The combination of restricting the bet types that fuel grievance and surfacing the worst offenders moved measurable volume, which is the case Fanatics and IC360 are now making to the rest of the operator field. State-level betting policy keeps shifting underneath all of this, from prop restrictions to the tax increases that squeeze operator margins and change how aggressively books chase volume.

IC360 itself is the merged product of US Integrity and Odds On Compliance, combined in April 2024 and led by CEO Matt Holt, with Sadin as co-CEO. Its reach is not limited to sportsbooks. The firm already has a partnership with prediction-market operator Kalshi, and an IC360 spokesperson said the Bad Actor mechanics would translate to Kalshi or any other prediction market that wanted to join, a notable opening as prediction markets push into sports event contracts that look and behave like wagers. For now Fanatics is the only confirmed member of any kind. The next data point worth watching is whether a second top-four operator signs on before the football season the program is timed to.