Jontay Porter says he has bet at least half a billion dollars, and his former VIP host explains how a sportsbook kept him playing

Jontay Porter, the former Toronto Raptors forward the NBA banned for life in April 2024, estimates he has wagered at least half a billion dollars in his life. The number comes from a long profile by writer Nick Berardini in the Nov. 16 issue of The New Yorker, which traces Porter’s path from a five-star recruit at Missouri to the player at the center of the league’s biggest betting scandal in decades.

Porter says he has not placed a bet since before his arrest, more than two years ago, and is in regular therapy. He does not call himself cured. “This war on my soul is going to continue,” he said. He also refused to blame anyone else for what happened. “We live in a generation of consumerism and greed,” he said. “And I was the pinnacle of that.”

From the first bet to $30 million in two weeks

Porter’s first big sports bet came in September 2021, when he was out of the league after two knee injuries. He had made about $2 million in NBA salary and received a $2.7 million insurance settlement. He opened a betting app on his phone and put $125,000 on the Kansas City Chiefs to beat the Baltimore Ravens. He had already been day-trading stocks and playing on offshore casino sites, and the money from basketball quickly became his gambling fund.

His favorite thing to bet on turned out to be table tennis. In one session at his brother’s apartment in Denver, he live-bet hundreds of thousands of dollars at a time on Russian table tennis for nearly three days straight and came out more than $1 million ahead. “It’s exhilarating because, in your mind, your whole life rides on how good a serve this Ping-Pong guy has,” Porter said. “It drives you insane, quite literally. Eyes bloodshot. Staring at the screen.”

The profile says the sportsbook’s own accounts team noticed that Porter had bet more than $30 million in his first two weeks on its app. When he did not answer an email asking whether he was “comfortable” with his “level of spending,” his account was briefly suspended. His VIP host, Frank Cardenas, walked him through a reply, and the account was turned back on. Cardenas also said the company once suspended Porter after a payment service reported he owed about $500,000 in overdrawn deposits.

The VIP host

Much of the piece is about Cardenas, who scouted big bettors for the company and treated Porter as one of his top clients. He gave Porter a $10,000 bonus to gamble with when he joined the VIP program, and another $10,000 the next night. Porter received perks including a new phone, courtside seats at NBA games and Super Bowl tickets. The two texted almost every day. “Frank became why I stayed,” Porter said.

Cardenas was later fired for violating the company’s code of conduct, shortly after the Porter scandal broke. He said the timing was a coincidence. A former executive of the VIP program defended the company’s handling of Porter but agreed there should be mandatory income checks for big bettors. The sportsbooks declined to answer questions for the piece. In a statement, the company said it had made “significant changes” since Porter’s time in the program, including more employee training and account reviews when concerning betting patterns appear.

Debts, bookies and the Raptors game

By the time Porter joined the Raptors in December 2023, he had bet more than $50 million on one app and millions more on another through a friend’s account, the profile says. He was also betting on credit with illegal bookies and had run up large debts. “I was sitting in my locker, like, leaned back so nobody can see my phone, watching college basketball, betting on that,” he said.

In March 2024, he took himself out of a game against the Sacramento Kings, saying he felt sick. Men tied to the scheme had placed parlays against his stats that would have paid out more than $1 million, and the bets were flagged immediately. The league banned him weeks later, and he pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Our earlier story on Porter’s talk at a New Jersey high school lays out what the NBA’s investigation found.

Berardini also found reasons to doubt parts of the debt story. Porter dealt with the bookies who pressured him only by text, and the profile reports that some of the phone numbers belonged to the same carrier and one traced back to a partner of Ammar Awawdeh, the bookie Porter dealt with most. Awawdeh, who has pleaded guilty to wire fraud and is due to be sentenced next year, would not say more when asked about it.

Why it matters for the league

The profile lands as the NBA keeps expanding its ties to betting. The league was an early investor in one of the big sportsbooks, and Adam Silver became the public face of the push to legalize sports betting with a 2014 op-ed. Last month the league named Kalshi and Polymarket as official prediction-market partners, while also asking its betting partners to drop opening-tip bets and single-player under parlays before the season.

The federal cases that grew out of the same world are still moving. Awawdeh was charged in the federal cases announced in October 2025, the same sweep that brought charges against Terry Rozier and Chauncey Billups, who has pleaded not guilty. Eric Earnest pleaded guilty in that case in October, and Malik Beasley has been in plea talks over separate charges.

Porter, now married with two young sons, stays home with the children and has mended his relationship with his brother, Michael Porter Jr. The lifetime ban means he cannot return to the NBA. Follow every league-wide story on our Around the league page.