The latest scandal involving young, amateur athletes was a long time coming, according to financial advisors.

As another NCAA college basketball season begins, a pay-to-play scandal touched off by Louis Martin Blazer III, a Pittsburgh financial advisor, threatens to shake up the popular sport and might even change the way advisors serve young athletes and their families.

Blazer, formerly the principal of Blazer Capital Management, was implicated in an SEC case accusing him of taking $2.35 million from professional athletes’ accounts between 2010 and 2012. Facing a list of SEC charges, including wire fraud, Blazer accepted a plea bargain without admitting or denying the charges and became a government witness in a case that has led to the arrest of four NCAA basketball coaches, agents and an executive at top apparel company Adidas. Also among those arrested were a sports agent and Munish Sood, a financial advisor.

Sterling Sullivan, a Chicago-based wealth advisor with Calamos Wealth Management who serves professional athletes as part of his clientele, says that the scandal has revealed only a small portion of the poorly behaving advisors, coaches and other officials surrounding college athletics.

“Being in the business of working with athletes, I think all of the honest advisors out there saw this coming,” says Sullivan. “My belief is that this is quite pervasive because there’s so much money that is changing hands in amateur and collegiate athletics.”

With Blazer’s testimony, prosecutors have already uncovered a long-running scheme to pay and lend money to young amateur athletes to convince them to stay on as advisory and management clients. According to federal prosecutors, NCAA coaches were bribed to steer players to certain agents and companies after they became professionals.

Josh Sailar, an investment advisor at Los Angeles-based Miracle Mile Advisors, says that Blazer’s case is far from unique in the shady world of collegiate and pre-collegiate amateur athletics.

“I can almost guarantee that there’s exploitation being swept under the rug here,” says Sailar. “I assume that this is something that has happened on a regular basis for decades.”

Recognizing that they can get more assets under management by attracting athletes earlier in their careers, agents, advisors and others are enticed by a perverse incentive to target ever younger, more vulnerable prospects, says Rick Buoncore, managing partner at Cleveland-based MAI Capital Managment.

While corruption and amateurism issues plague all sports, high-level amateur basketball seems to be most effected, Buoncore says, adding that players often come from socially disadvantaged backgrounds, with little legal knowledge or financial literacy.

“The sport most abused, by far, is basketball,” says Buoncore, himself a former NCAA Division 1 baseball player. “Part of it is the circumstances of basketball. There are five players on the floor at any given time, 10 to 15 active players on a team. At the higher levels, a huge spotlight is on these players. It’s literally rags to riches.”

Buoncore says that, because agents are not allowed to talk to basketball players until they’ve forgone their amateur status and declared for a professional draft, sports agencies are using financial advisors as the first point of contact for promising young athletes.

“There is no such restriction for a financial advisor,” says Buoncore. “I don’t know how prevalent it is, but sometimes the agents align themselves with advisors, and advisors are running clients for them under the guise of providing financial advice and preparation for a professional career. It’s an incestuous relationship.”

Buoncore says that shady agents have attempted to approach his firm about creating a pipeline for young amateur athletes to go pro.

“We’ve been approached by that, but it’s not what we do,” says Buoncore, who notes that his firm only gets involved with basketball players after they’ve declared their professional status. At the earliest stages, the work mostly revolves around budgeting and conservative investing to allow young clients to build sustainable wealth “in case, tomorrow, their knee gives out. Our philosophy has always been to first protect them from themselves.”

More commonly, advisors, agents, boosters and other interested parties will contact students via a friend or family member, says Sullivan.

Family and friends often surround the most promising athletes, eager to take part in the phenom’s success, advisors say.

“Imagine yourself as one of these star athletes in high school, or college, or even professionally,” says Buoncore. “Everyone they deal with feels as if they’ve been drafted as well. Everybody feels like they can ask them for $50,000 or $100,000 to open a restaurant or start a car lot or something else. They get picked apart because they don’t want to be the bad guy.”

Early in their careers, talented grade-school-aged basketball players participate in summer club teams organized by the Amateur Athletics Union (AAU). AAU coaches are often the longest relationship of a young athlete’s life, staying with them until a college choice is made and often influencing that decision. In basketball, most of the private AAU leagues are sponsored and run by major athletics apparel companies like Nike, Adidas and Under Armour, who all have an interest in cashing in on a player’s success after they’ve turned professional.

These apparel companies also sign large contracts with universities whose athletics programs use their products, creating a seamless stream of customers, clients and celebrity spokespeople from wunderkind child athletes, to NCAA student athletes, to young adult professional stars, Sullivan says.

As a result, young athletes are natural targets for financial exploitation, he says.

“Exploitation is more common than a lack of exploitation,” says Buoncore. “In the last few years, we’ve gotten guys who were taken advantage of by advisors, family members, friends, and it’s often hard to communicate to them about what’s happened because they don’t really want to understand it. They’ve grown up as athletes, that’s what they want to focus on, not their finances.”

Trading in their amateur status for early financial status may be costly for young athletes as the damages from fraud and other exploitative behaviors threatens their ability to create financial stability later in their life, advisors say.

“The average career is four or five years. They have a really short time horizon for their earnings, but need to plan for 20 to 40 years in the future,” says Sailar. “These players, from a young age, have been told to focus on one or two things their entire career because this is what they do well and what they’re going to be.”

If a young athlete loses amateur status after accepting money from an advisor they could be putting a pro career at risk, as the track record for young college basketball players who leave college early or forego college entirely to play professionally overseas is not marked by a large number of successes.

“Our approach is one of education. We’re willing to sit down with anyone who is willing to learn about financial literacy and education,” says Sullivan. “We work with first round draft picks, we work with people on practice squads, it doesn’t really matter. We’re happy to do that.”

For the most part, firms like Miracle Mile Advisors are referred to athletes by referrals from family members or trusted centers of influence, says Sailar.

“We’re usually referred to the athlete,” says Sailar. “We end up serving them and anybody else they would like included in their meetings and communications. At times they include family members, but not all the time.”

MAI, Miracle Mile and Calamos typically serve athletes later in their career, and the vast majority of the  financial industry serves athletes appropriately, says Buoncore.

“In [profession] you have bad actors. ... Most advisors are doing things the right way. The ones trying to take advantage and who act in self-serving ways are a minority. They’re the bad apples.”

As federal agencies attempt to clean up college athletics, Buoncore notes that the NCAA failed to protect its young athletes and control the behavior of major athletic programs. In some ways, the NCAA itself is a barrier to cleaning up amateur sports, he says, because its amateurism rules do not allow athletes to receive payment for their services, creating additional incentive for bad behaviors.

“When you’re a Division 1 athlete, it is like having a full-time job,” he says. “You have to practice, you have to travel, you have to keep up with your classes, and you’re at a tremendous disadvantage when it comes to time. Then, you’re back on campus and everybody you know in your world is going out to have fun. ... The system creates part of the problem.”