Ex-NBA Player Chris Gatling Arrested For Credit Card Fraud Scheme, And Somehow It's Not Entirely His Fault

Sports Illustrated- Former NBA All-Star Chris Gatling was arrested in Scottsdale, Ariz., on Thursday and accused of operating a large-scale online fraud scheme using credit card information from people across the country.

Police said Saturday that Gatling was booked on charges of fraud schemes, aggravated identity theft and forgery, and later released. TMZ.com first reported his arrested on Thursday.

After meeting a Scottsdale fitness studio owner on a dating website this year, police said, Gatling told her he operated Internet businesses that created websites and fixed credit. Gatling, 47, asked her to charge credit card numbers through her business, offering her 10 percent of the dollar amounts charged. Gatling would receive the remaining 90 percent.

When the credit card charges were discovered, they were deemed unauthorized and charged back to the victim. She lost $90,000, police said, and was forced to close the fitness studio.


Don't get me wrong here, Chris Gatling is definitely a scumbag, but putting the entirety of the blame on him for online fraud is simply disingenuous. Hey lady, could you be a better online dater one time for me? You think you can just scour Match.com and expect every single person you meet to uphold the highest of moral standards? Didn't you think for a second that it would serve you well to do a little Google search on a guy that was asking you to run a bunch of credit cards after having known you for only a few months? Maybe then you would have seen that Chris Gatling 'the internet entrepreneur that likes long walks on the beach' is really just a broken down NBA player turned career criminal. Bet you would have been a bit more skeptical if you had seen that it was just two years ago that your new crush was found squatting in, and attempting to rent out, a home that wasn't his. Come on sweetheart. These are the risks you take when you put more faith in someone's fabricated identity on a website than their face-to-face portrayal of themselves. We going to act like Chris Gatling is the first person to lie on a dating site? The onus is on her to get to the bottom of who he really is, or at least to avoid engaging in swiping stranger's credit cards until she does. If online profiles were real then everyone would be a well off, super ambitious model that looks exactly the same as their pictures. No one would venture outside of the internet to find their next partner. 

Look what you did lady. Didn't you think there was something fishy about the ex-professional athlete that looks like he hasn't seen a weight in a decade maintaining a strong interest in the owner of a fitness studio? What the hell do you two have in common? Chris Gatling was more likely to burn that gym to the ground than he was to walk inside and burn more than a calorie. Metaphorically speaking, that's exactly what he did. Now you no longer have a business because you put trust into an old fat guy on a dating site, and I can't even sit here and feel bad for you.

Yo Chris, why are the cops here?