What Yogi Berra might have said about ‘spot-fixing,’ Luis Ortiz and automated transaction monitoring
In an article for ACAMS Today, LBKM partner Art Middlemiss discusses "spot-fixing" and how an automated transaction-monitoring system likely flagged an unusual amount of money bet on a July 6, 2025 pitch by Cleveland Guardians pitcher Luis Ortiz, who was indicted in federal court last week as part of a sports betting and money laundering conspiracy.
Prior to joining LBKM, Art served as managing director and a senior compliance executive at JPMorgan Chase & Co. and as bureau chief of the Manhattan District Attorney's international financial crimes bureau.
This is the inside baseball: An automated surveillance system must have spotted the anomaly. An analyst followed up on the alert, saw Ortiz spike the pitch, looked for a pattern of similar activity, found it and reported it. Ortiz is now suspended from baseball, and there is increased attention being paid to “spot-fixing,” a phenomenon where a singular event in a game, like a single pitch, is “fixed” to ensure the outcome of a prop bet—a wager on a particular event within the game.
Kudos to IC360 for “catching” the pitch. The public has no special insight into their tools, but anyone who has worked in anti-money laundering (AML) compliance at a bank has a pretty good guess what happened: The real credit goes to an analyst, who turned an automated surveillance system alert into a much-needed solid hit.