NCAA, Venmo announce partnership to combat harassment of college athletes

The NCAA and Venmo, a popular online payment service, announced a partnership Tuesday to combat harassment of collegiate athletes that have received unwanted financial and informational requests from losing bettors and gamblers impacted by their performance.

As part of the NCAA-Venmo partnership, the payment service has agreed to start a dedicated hotline for collegiate athletes to report abuse and harassment, provide user education on account security and increased monitoring to combat abuse.

“The harassment we are seeing across various online platforms is unacceptable, and we need fans to do better,” NCAA President Charlie Baker said in the Venmo release. “We applaud Venmo for taking action, and we need more social media companies and online platforms to do the same. Several states have passed laws to crack down on this behavior to protect student-athletes, and we hope more do the same because stopping this abuse requires action on multiple fronts.”

Venmo, which is owned by PayPal, issued a press release in which it cites a recent NCAA study that found 12-percent of abusive content aimed at college athletes is linked to sports betting, with 19-percent of harassment cases in men’s football involving betting-related abuse. Occassionally, those cases involve sports fans and bettors sending unwanted payment requests to college football players asking to be financially compensated after they lose a bet placed on that athlete’s performance in a game.

“While unwanted interactions to athletes make up an extremely small percentage of transactions on Venmo, even a small number of these incidents is unacceptable,” said David Szuchman, PayPal’s SVP and Head of Global Financial Crime and Customer Protection, in the press release. “The safety and security of our users remain our highest priority. Harassment or abuse of any kind is not tolerated on the platform, and strict action is taken against users who violate our policies. Through these measures, we are taking decisive steps to help prevent the misuse of our platform and ensure all our users feel protected when they use Venmo.”

This partnership comes two weeks after Oklahoma quarterback John Mateer was briefly embroiled in a scandal after old 2022 Venmo transactions were uncovered with descriptions indicating they were used for “sports gambling.” Mateer later described those labels as “inside jokes between me and my friends,” and any inference he was involved in sports gambling during his time at Washington State were “false.”

“The allegations that I once participated in sports gambling are false,” Mateer said in a statement. “My previous Venmo descriptions did not accurately portray the transactions in question but were instead inside jokes between me and my friends.

“I have never bet on sports. I understand the seriousness of the matter, but recognize that, taken out of context, those Venmo descriptions suggest otherwise. I can assure my teammates, coaches, and officials at the NCAA that I have no engaged in any sports gambling.”