Ahead of his last fight in January against Deiveson Figueiredo, Brandon Moreno had been forced to switch coaches as he was preparing because his former coach, James Krause, was under investigation by gambling authorities.
Ahead of a fight in November, U.S. Integrity, a betting monitoring company, became alerted of significant changes in odds involving a fighter Krause had worked with. The fighter, Darrick Minner, had lost via technical knockout and was later discovered to have had an undisclosed injury entering the fight.
The U.F.C. reviewed the situation and eventually threatened to bar fighters from events if they continued to train with Krause. Multiple agencies, including U.S. Integrity and the Nevada State Athletic Commission, are still investigating. Krause did not respond to a message seeking comment.
The scandal aligns with similar troubles in the N.F.L., as the league this off-season suspended six players indefinitely for violating its gambling policy.
In January, the U.F.C. announced a yearlong partnership with U.S. Integrity to strengthen it’s education and enforcement measures. Scott Sadin, the co-founder and chief operating officer of U.S. Integrity, said the company has conducted in-person and virtual trains with U.F.C. staff, fighters and their teams about the U.F.C.’s gambling policy and laws in certain states, and also overview incidents of previous violations of betting policies regrading different sports leagues.
“We anonymize those case studies, and we give them real life examples of what can go wrong if you’re not diligent and if you’re not sort of proactively thinking about what you shouldn’t be doing with respect to sports betting,” Sadin said in an interview.
