The night before his big game against the Central Coast Mariners on March 28, Danny Taylor received a message from an Instagram account called ‘sports_fixed2020’ asking him to throw the match for £30,000. When he refused, it got ugly. There were death threats.
“I just ask 1thing frome u just loose the match tomorrow,” the user wrote. “U will sleep with ur eyes open, I will wait by Abby her door if ur wife go out the house I will wait there standing.”
Taylor isn't a professional footballer – he’s an esports player, who was competing in the ‘Ultimate Quaran-team Cup’, a recently created online charity FIFA tournament pitting full-time esports players, amateurs and professional football players (including Crystal Palace’s Andros Townsend) against each other.
Tournaments like these have sprung up in the void left by the cancellation of most global sporting events. With the quarantine and lack of traditional live sport to choose from, a whole new class of spectator and gambler who may have never considered esports are now flocking to them. Twitch, the world’s largest gaming streaming site, for example, saw a 23 per cent increase to 1.2 billion hours streamed in March alone and Steam, the video game distribution platform, experienced an all-time peak with 24.5 million users last Sunday.
These new tournaments are plastered across betting sites such as Bet365 and Paddy Power. With the Premier League postponed, the Olympics cancelled and the race tracks closed, bookmakers have gone from having a free-flowing 24-hour cycle of sporting events to choose from to finding themselves in desperate need of alternatives.
So they have started considering sports they had never considered before or obscure leagues that were normally found in the deepest, darkest recesses of their sites. And while Belarusian football and Russian table tennis managed to plug some of the gaps, esports have offered welcome relief. But it’s come at a cost.
The inflow of gambling money into esports has led to the inevitable rise of match-fixing. There have been isolated incidents before. In 2016, Lee Seung-Hyun, a famous and successful Starcraft II player from South Korea was arrested, given a suspended prison sentence of 18 months and a hefty fine for throwing two matches.
But the new tournaments springing up during the pandemic are at particularly high risk of being tampered with, according to Ian Smith, commissioner for the non-profit Esports Integrity Commission. “The evidence very clearly, although we’re a relatively short time into this virus crisis, is that match-fixing has increased quite dramatically,” he says.
Taylor, who has played FIFA professionally in recent years but is now out of contract, had never heard of anyone being offered money to lose on FIFA before the coronavirus. Compared to more established esports like Fortnite, Dota 2 or League of Legends, FIFA was much smaller. “I think this was the first time I had betting markets available for my games,” he says.
He’s not the only player to have been threatened. In the Quaran-team Cup, for example, there were multiple additional cases of threats made against players by gamblers, even pushing one team from Holland, FC Emmen, to withdraw. Lewis Frampton, for example, was playing his first game in the tournament representing Brentford FC and struggled with a jittery start, going 1-0 down before scoring a late equaliser to draw 1-1. “I’m not used to that many people watching,” says Frampton of the nearly 2,000 people who were streaming the game via Twitch. “It was daunting, I felt really nervous.” It didn’t help, either, that he was getting slated in the comments on the edge of his screen by Brentford fans and those who had placed bets on him to win.
One disgruntled gambler went a step further, though, with an instagram account sending Frampton a message before the replay match. “You fucking useless piece of shit. You and your whole family deserve to get drowned in the ocean,” the account wrote, “if you don’t win this game I will lock your mother up in my basement.” Frampton reported the account, but it remains active.
Playing for Finn Harps, an Irish club from County Donegal, Pearse Doherty played his first game against Oldham Athletic. And when he won 6-1, he suddenly became hot property on the betting market. The day of his next match, he was the ‘most backed today’ on Sky Bet at 9/4. And, when he lost, he received a lot of abuse on social media from gamblers, calling him a “pedo” and a “match-fixing leprechaun cunt.” “This took a massive toll on my mental health,” Doherty says.
Match-fixing and threats like this in online FIFA tournaments are a new phenomenon, says Smith. “There was just no incentive to match-fix from a gambling perspective,” he adds – there was simply not enough activity or money involved.
But now, there is, with newfound interest from quarantined sports fans and desperate betting companies. “They are now the main product,” says Smith, although he questions the legitimacy of the odds on offer. “How can you offer sensible markets on a game where you don’t even know who the players really are, you’ve got no data on them?”
The very nature of these tournaments, and the fact they’ve popped up quickly to fill demand, means there’s a lack of regulation implemented by tournament organisers, and little information flowing to organisations such as the Esports Integrity Commission, that monitor suspicious betting. “Esports face a somewhat unique problem,” says Smith. “[There’s] no governing body, no central authority, outside what we do. “I’m hoping as the dust clears, that people will give this some thought and start putting measures in place. At the moment, it’s just a little chaotic.”
Even the basic stuff is difficult. A few months ago, Smith was investigating a possible match-fixing incident in a lower-level qualifier for a big esports event. He was 99 per cent sure that the team involved had deliberately underperformed and wanted to get into contact with them. But the organisers had accepted the team into the tournament without checking any names. “That exact problem is only going to get worse and worse as these low level, low price events proliferate during this crisis,” he says. “We’re gonna have guys fixing with impunity.”
In ten years dealing with high-level betting rings who bribe and intimidate, Smith has never come across anyone actually following through with their threats. So, when Danny Taylor received the messages from ‘sports_fixed2020’ including threats to kill him and rape his girlfriend, he didn’t feel too intimidated. “I knew they were empty threats from someone who was just trying to make some easy money,” he says.
But, the sudden influx of cash could also attract the attention of larger betting syndicates, who are currently starved of their main source of income, and who are known to actually employ violence to get their way. “These guys aren’t interested in what sport they fix, they’re only interested in the return of investment,” Smith says. “Now, let’s be honest, the only chance is in the esports world.”
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
