Recent MMA event included the ultimate kind of…

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Last month, the Westgate SuperBook called for the NFL to investigate whether someone who dropped huge money on Buccaneers’ futures wagers had inside information about Tom Brady‘s imminent unretirement. More recently, multiple sportsbooks were apparently duped by the ultimate inside information.

They took bets on a sporting event that had been recorded in advance of its broadcast.

ESPN.com has the story. FuboTV televised on Friday, April 1 an event of the PFL Challenger Series. It was promoted as a live event.

It wasn’t. The fights were pretaped. A full week earlier.

Odds on the winning fighters moved significant in favor of the winning fighters on Friday, presumably as people who knew the outcomes placed bets. One fighter went from being a -250 favorite to -2500. U.S. Integrity, a Las Vegas-based company that monitors betting markets, alerted sportsbooks on Saturday that the fights had indeed been pretaped.

A PFL spokesperson acknowledged to ESPN.com that the event had been prerecorded. He did not offer a reason for it.

It’s unclear why or how the sportsbooks were duped. Did someone try to fool them? Did they simply exercise negligence in assuming that the event was live when it wasn’t?

Something like this obviously would never happen for the NFL or any major sport. However, if sportsbooks have firewall flaws based on something as simple as whether a given event already has happened, what other defects are out there, waiting for a smart and creative bettor to exploit them? Surely, motivated gamblers are constantly looking for them.