CSGO Matchfixing 101

Before the history is laid out you have to know the methods and the jargon. Esports matchfixing has its own methods that aren't mirrored in the sports world.

Before we break down the methods you must know going in that not all match-fixing is equal. In a number of countries known for this type of activity you will find behind it serious organised crime and by serious I mean "turn up at your house in the middle of the night and put a gun to your head with a view to killing you" serious. Indeed several overseas sources I spoke to in order to complete this investigation have had a gun pulled on them. Sometimes the gun is just introduced into the conversation to underline the importance of throwing a particular match. Sometimes it is pointed at them directly if they object to their instructions. On another day they might get a phone call from their mother saying a well dressed stranger knocked on their door and asked if they were home. The message is very clear.

The criminals are experts at getting their hooks into anyone they need to make these machinations work. Before a threat is even required they will have set themselves up as silent financial partners in the teams the players represent. Sometimes they run whole leagueswith the expectation that every game played within it will serve their desires. If the conventional leverage of a contract or a visa being pulled doesn't work and keep the players under control, brute force is always the next step. So then, how can we not be sympathetic with players in circumstances such as these? Who wouldn't fix a match to save their parents or themselves? Often the players in these situations don't even see a return for fixing the game if you can believe it. Their salary and job security is the reward. That and not being executed. And when you put it like that it's a pretty compelling package, especially for people who are dirt-poor in the first place. The North American match-fixing story you will learn about here is absolutely nothing like that. It is a tale of greed stupidity and hubris. You will not require sympathy.

I will operate under the assumption that the average reader has never engaged in any form of match-fixing activity and therefore might not understand how it works. If you place bets on sporting events it will be relevant to your interests. There's not a single sport that has been untouched by the taint of match-fixing and as global crime syndicates become more and more brazen in how they operate that is unlikely to change any time soon. If anyone thought esports would be immune, that a couple of high profile cases being punished would deter the greedy, then they were optimistic past the point of delusion.

The most common form of match-fixing is simply playing to lose which presents a few opportunities for profit. Simply put, if you know that you yourself aren't going to win you can place bets accordingly. This generates value if you are the favourites with the sports books as you can typically wait until the odds have shifted after bets have been placed in your favour then you put a surge of bets on what will now be the best odds available a short time ahead of the match. While it's the easiest method to enact it's also the easiest one to detect. That surge of bets that gets placed? That drastically causes a visible shift in the odds as the sportsbook adjusts the moneyline and remember it's not just the bookies that can see that, the punters can too. So, while in smaller markets, a speculative bet from someone with more money than sense can cause an odds shift, generally the placing of bets like these in clusters will flag a betting website's protection system and often result in them voiding all bets entirely, but more on that later

By the same token when you are playing to lose you have to fuck it up but not fuck it up spectacularly. If you make it too obvious you might as well hold up a sign that says "yeah we are committing a crime" and many sports books and regulators employ experts to judge the likelihood of the match actually being fixed. One of the most absurd examples in recent memory was a 2014 Indonesian football match between PSS Sleman and PSIS Semarang. There were rumours of match fixing abound going in to the game and then the prospect of having to face an alleged mafia backed team in the next round of the cup the match took place in meant that both teams became locked into an absurd ballet of bad play, culminating in a flurry of deliberate own goals. The match saw both teams disqualified rom the top flight of Indonesian football.

Another aspect to this is players who expect to get beaten by a much better opponent might often resign themselves to defeat and place bets on themselves to lose. This creates a murky moral territory many will philosophise about. "They were going to lose anyway so why not make some money on the side?" This is a phrase I often heard as I conducted my interviews. If you can believe it some of the match-fixers I spoke to directly who placed bets on themselves to lose still tried to convince me that they were trying their hardest to win, the money being just a consolation prize. It's all bullshit at the end of the day, little more than an attempt to justify something that everyone in any sport knows you should not do.

Moving up to the next tier of sophistication you have paying someone to lose. While this might not seem much of a variation on the playing to lose method described, it comes with a unique set of risks and protections. In terms of protection it actually allows you to fly under the radar because even if you got caught placing bets on yourself to win, still an offence under almost every regulatory body's code of conduct, you have the plausible deniability of saying you were trying your hardest. It also has a similar financial upside as playing to lose in how you can manipulate odds by having the underdog win and it frees your team of you having to be the ones that make the suspicious plays. As in all criminal enterprises the problems with this method revolves around trust.

As I was told many times in interviews a typical amount offered to a player to lose a match was $2000. These amounts would usually be paid in cryptocurrency  as the prevailing sentiment is that makes the transaction untraceable. It wasn't also unheard of for money to change hands via Paypal accounts created under aliases but as cryptocurrency became more and more prevalent that was the preferred method. Once paid the player or players in question would have to play so staggeringly bad as to tank their whole team's performance. It doesn't make sense to pay all five players on a Counter-Strike team as it eats into profit margins and isn't necessary to all but guarantee a loss, so it would typically just be reserved for one or two players that were known to the fixers or were in the fixing group themselves. The preference would be to co-opt an in-game leader, the person that decides the tactics and delivers the instructions, because their potential impact on a team's performance is significantly greater than any other player. If you're quick on the uptake you will realise that this means there are many players who played in fixed matches without ever knowing that their teammates betrayed them.

This brings us to the element of trust I spoke about. If you pay someone to throw a game you have to be able to trust them. One recording of the conversation, one screenshot of a chat log, one identifying component in a financial transaction and the whole conspiracy comes tumbling down. People get stupid, people get greedy, people use this new found leverage for blackmail. The whole thing can get real messy real fast. Not to mention the proviso always is if you accept the $2000 payout that is in lieu of you making side bets of your own, which would of course raise the suspicions and create the same investigative trail that we established as being present in betting on yourself to lose. In North American Counter-Strike it turned out few fixers had the discipline to just take the payouts.

One more step up the ladder for all aspiring digital kingpins is the double fix. This is where two betting circles comprised of fixers coordinate to rig an outcome for the most value. This can be done via a points spread or you can place bets on a very specific number of things occurring in a match, such as Southampton's football players that rigged the time of the first throw-in taken in matches for the benefit of a Chinese betting syndicate. You can also generate a specific scoreline since as both teams are in on the scam. CS:GO matches can be rigged in all these ways as both teams, sometimes in real time communication with each other, can manipulate the outcome of each round played. This method became more preferable with the rise of live-betting in esports but a very simple way to generate the highest returns from these fixes was to always ensure that if a match was a best of three series all three maps had to be played, with the favoured team on each map, of course, losing. You win one, we win one, whoever wins the decider is dictated by the odds.

Then there's also the real-time fix, which combines a number of elements from all of the above. Specifically for CS:GO how this would work is the favourite team comes out and plays their seemingly normal game and gets into what seems like an unassailable lead, for example 11-0. As the odds shift further and further against the underdogs the players then fake internet issues or make a substitution or call for a timeout due to "tech issues." During this time they will then either themselves or through proxies place bets on the underdogs and they will then restart the game and suddenly be playing terrible. Anecdotally they can chalk the loss down to bad luck or internet, a lesser able substitute to point to or a breakdown in momentum.  Some even choose to blame the phantom of Denial of Service attacks, which further cements their position as victims rather than villains. No-one even blinks when this is suggested as there is a long history of DDOS attacks being used from angry bettors or fixers to either cancel or change the outcome of matches and it's also widely accepted players are stupid enough to give away their IP address without realising. These tales don't really hold up though when you can see multiple bets coming in within moments of each other, all betting the same way and all banking on a spectacular comeback and upset. There's a sophistication in this method but also a staggering depth of stupidity as the expectation is that you have to believe everyone who made those mysterious bets thought they were getting incredibly lucky and also felt lucky at the same time.

Arriving at what is probably the most sophisticated method and one that is unique to esports is what is colloquially known among the players as being "on radar." Here a fixer will reach out to another fixer, sometimes one strategically placed on another team by the group for their purposes,  with a view of being able to bet on themselves to win. They pay the co-conspirator on the team set to lose a flat rate of money and then that individual uses an online communications tool to stream their screen to the team that needs to win. This zero delay reveal of their opponents radar provides the underdog team with a functional wallhack and enables them to win their match easily and by almost any margin they can conceive. All the legitimate players on the losing team believe they lost fair and square unaware that someone from inside their fold has sold them out for a share of the profits. Coaches in particular are prized for this method because they have access to the information necessary for the fix but don't actually play in the game themselves and thus can never make a suspicious play that would draw attention in the way other methods listed would. As coach communications aren't usually recorded any standard form of forensic analysis of a flagged match is hampered as there is no audio or visual component to judge either.

Worth mentioning here is one that probably feels sophisticated but is actually unbelievably reckless is simply cheating to win while placing bets on you to win. There’s not been a lot of that in North America. They seem to have a better understanding of the whole risk and reward aspect to this kind of operation. While I have no doubt it has happened, it certainly isn’t as prevalent as it was in Germany from 2015-2016 where match-fixers were also blatantly using third party software to enhance their performances. The downside is obvious. If you get banned by a league’s anti-cheat, or worse still Valve’s anti-cheat, then you will be barred from competing entirely and therefore can’t fix the matches at all. With so many other methods available this would only be worth risking as some sort of one-off.

Finally and at the peak levels of intricacy is the use of live-streams from betting site operators and data partners to alter outcomes of matches. For integrity purposes betting websites require a live feed of the game with zero delay. This is used for monitoring and data purposes and generally bettors are shown a delayed stream so even their “live betting” is based on a delayed feed, the delay varying depending on the site, game etc. The access to these live feeds are either authorised by the tournament organiser as part of an agreement to have their matches featured on the betting platform or purchased by “data service providers.” Some of these companies are not legitimate and they purchase access to the stream to either sell on to syndicates and fixers, or provide access to confederates of theirs. This method has started to increase in popularity of late as the front of a business obscures exactly who will be provided with access to the live feed. It also carries no risk of a ban for cheating even though it confers players with the exact same benefits of a radarhack.

Like all potentially criminal enterprises communication is a crucial problem to overcome. It is impossible to co-ordinate a fixed match without being able to make sure people do their part and that people place the bets. Obviously it goes without saying that when these things could spill out into the open very few would directly say “hi, do you want to throw a match today.” There’s a formal etiquette to it all, involving a code. If a player was contacted and asked “how they were feeling” about their upcoming game this could be seen as a fish for information or an invitation to discuss a proposition. If the other person was in the know then they would “suggest” how the other party should bet, something that again could look innocent to prying eyes. Fixers would also use humour and sarcasm to cloak fixes. Any direct talk of throwing could be dismissed as just a bit of harmless fun between friends. Talking in this manner was the first barrier of defence should anyone decide to betray confidences.

The technological evolution has given the fixers more tools than ever to speak openly and with impunity. No longer do you have to risk recorded phone calls or traceable emails, you can use encrypted live chat programs that don’t record any logs on their servers. The most popular at the time of writing is Telegram created by Russian billionaire with a passion for privacy called Pavel Durov. They remain utterly steadfast in their commitment to having no form of accessible data should law enforcement make requests, stating in their terms of service they would only provide an IP and phone number to law enforcement if they produced a court order stating that the target was a terrorist suspect. Upon sign-up this is made abundantly clear:

“End-to-End Encrypted Data

Your messages, media and files from secret chats (see section 3.3.2 above), as well as the contents of your calls and the data you store in your Telegram Passport are processed only on your device and on the device of your recipient. Before this data reaches our servers, it is encrypted with a key known only to you and the recipient. While Telegram servers will handle this end-to-end encrypted data to deliver it to the recipient – or store it in the case of Telegram Passport data, we have no ways of deciphering the actual information. In this case, we neither store nor process your personal data, rather we store and process random sequences of symbols that have no meaning without the keys which we don’t have."

Over the course of this story you will see the evolution of private communication, moving from private forums, via way of self-deleting Snapchats and eventually Telegram. They only way there could ever be a leak of the latter program would be if a co-conspirator was to share the information, a fact that has led many match-fixers to feel secure in their peer-to-peer plotting.

Through these methods dozens of North American players were able to run lucrative match-fixing circles that agreed to work together where possible to increase profits. The length of time that this operate along with ever increasing amounts of money made it easy for the ringleaders to induce other players to come into the fold and throw games too. A combination of lack of salaries from the organisations fielding the teams and the economic uncertainty created by the Coronavirus pandemic only made more and more players yield to the temptation. In regards to the ESEA League one source said that multiple teams worked together in tandem to maximise their outcomes and that by their estimations approximately 80% of the matches in one season were tampered with in some way and yet somehow none of the protections in place prevented it or even flagged it.