A women’s tennis player has criticized the WTA Tour’s response to threats of violence sent to her personal telephone. Panna Udvardy, the world No. 95, is the second WTA Tour player to talk about such threats prior to now week, which the tour has advised gamers usually are not the outcome of a personal data breach.
Udvardy, 27, acquired a message from a telephone quantity with a United Kingdom nation code, instructing her to lose a match at a match one rung under the principle tour.
The message, sent forward of her assembly with Ukraine’s Anhelina Kalinina in Antalya, Turkey, included a menace to kidnap her mom, in addition to saying that the individual chargeable for the message had particulars of the place her dad and mom and grandmother reside.
The message was accompanied by pictures of Udvardy’s household, in addition to a photograph of a hand gun and the menace that “we have two groups near Hungary ready for war if necessary.”
“At midnight I’m panicking, I’m alone in the hotel. I was really scared, so I forwarded these messages to my parents,” Udvardy stated by way of voice message.
“I forwarded it also to the supervisor and the WTA player relations team. I wrote an email to the social media team at the WTA. I could not sleep for two hours.”
Udvardy stated that when she went to the WTA match supervisor’s workplace, she was advised that she was not the primary player to obtain these varieties of messages.
She stated that the supervisor advised her that there was an investigation right into a doable leak of gamers’ personal data, which, the supervisor stated, defined the latest prevalence of messages sent to gamers’ personal telephones.
“The WTA tried to downplay the situation a little bit. I didn’t see any extra security being placed or any kind of real concern,” Udvardy stated.
“The supervisor told me, ‘Oh, it happened to other players, so don’t worry.’
“OK, but I am worried — it’s my phone number, my personal data, who knows what else they have?”
Udvardy stated that the tour’s safeguarding workforce had additionally advised her that the gun picture was an outdated one, which implied that the individual sending the message didn’t really a possess a firearm.
“I don’t see how that’s better,” she stated.
A supply briefed on the Antalya match’s operations, who spoke on the situation of anonymity as a result of they weren’t licensed to converse publicly, stated that the supervisor’s remark to Udvardy didn’t represent an official assertion and was made off the cuff.
In an electronic mail sent to gamers following Udvardy’s reporting of the threats towards her which has been reviewed by The Athletic, the group stated that there had not been an official WTA data breach, and stated that the FBI is contributing to an investigation into the provenance of the threatening messages.
It additionally instructed gamers to instantly contact the tour’s safeguarding workforce within the occasion of receiving threatening messages, whether or not on personal telephones or social media.
The FBI has beforehand been concerned in investigations of threatening messages. In a 2024 season-wide report into abuse of gamers commissioned by the WTA Tour and World Tennis, 15 circumstances had been reported to regulation enforcement, and three of them to the FBI.
The tour makes use of Signify Group’s Threat Matrix service, which is designed to assist shield gamers on social media by detecting and filtering out abusive messages by way of a mixture of AI and human analysts.
Italian girls’s player Lucrezia Stefanini stated that she acquired related threats, together with a photograph of a gun, forward of a first-round loss in qualifying for the BNP Paribas Open at Indian Wells. Multiple ATP Tour gamers have additionally stated that they’ve acquired direct threats in latest weeks.
“I immediately alerted the WTA, which provided me with more security … The entire tournament mobilized to make me feel safe,” Stefanini stated in a video message posted to social media.
Udvardy in the end misplaced her match, in two tight units, saying that she was proud of herself for creating probabilities to win throughout such a tense state of affairs. After it, she stated, “the supervisor, the tournament director, and three police officers came up to me.
“They said that the Hungarian consulate sent them, because my parents wrote an email to the Hungarian embassy informing them about this, and they wanted to make sure everyone was safe.”
“They sent out people to watch my match and to watch me … They also offered me a security person at all times while I’m still here in Antalya.”
Tennis players on both tours have become accustomed to receiving abuse and harassment on social media, most prevalently from bettors who’ve misplaced cash on their matches. Former WTA Tour Finals champion Caroline Garcia, who retired from tennis in 2025, stated she rejected a $270,000 betting sponsorship for the player podcast that she hosts consequently of her experiences with bettor abuse throughout her profession.
The WTA and ATP excursions each have data partnerships with organizations that serve sports activities books and betting corporations, mostly by transmitting match data. Stats Perform in 2023 prolonged its partnership with the ladies’s tour to 2030.
“They’re always on Instagram, usually fake profiles, you can see it’s a very emotional response,” Udvardy stated of abuse she has acquired on social media. “They lost their money and they’re just trying to hurt you in that way, by calling you names.”
She then described the extra concern and stress attributable to receiving such messages in private, including that this was the primary time she had acquired a menace on her personal telephone.
“Are we waiting for something to happen to put more safety measures for the players, or worry? I don’t think this should be the case,” she stated.
“This should not be normalized.”
