The Underworld Podcast - How Russian Mobsters Masterminded a Crazy, Fake Cricket League for Betting Riches: Sean's in the Field!

Episode Date: October 10, 2023

This May, on assignment for _Sports Illustrated_, Sean visited Molipur, a tiny village in Gujarat, India, to dive into what seemed like a funny caper: villagers establishing a fake cricket league to fool Russian punters. But almost as soon as he stepped off the plane, the story took a sharp right turn. The Russians were pulling the villagers' strings all along. And the sportsbook behind it all is one of the slickest and maddest money-laundering schemes on the planet. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. It's early 2020 in the Indian town of Mollipo, Gujarat. Shodavda is a wiry bangle merchant with an even more wiry beard, and he's in deep trouble. His store is failing, and since his father's death, he's the sole breadwinner for his wife and five kids. Davda needs to think quick. Northern Gujarat is agri-country, so he gets a fat loan from the bank,

over $20,000, and spends it on cattle and a cow shed. Safe bets, or so he thinks. Soon after, COVID hits. The government in New Delhi acts and almost 1.4 billion people are locked down. Industry grinds to a halt. People go without food in Gujarat.

And Davda's budding business dies almost overnight. It's a desire. Davda is desperate and he needs a quick fix. Fortunately, Gujarat is home to one of the most thriving human trafficking networks on earth, ferrying people from the massive 60 million populated state into North America and Europe. A friend tells Dvda he can make bank working on a Mediterranean island named Malta, but he can't fly their direct. Instead, Dvda will get to Moscow, where contacts will hook him up with a Maltese visa.

By January 2022, Davda is in the Russian capital, where he meets a man he's only known via the messaging app Telegram as Misha. Only Davda never makes it to Malta. Instead, Misha dispatches him to a suburban Moscow factory, where he boxes toys by day and sleeps beside other South Asian men in the building by night. Davda is working illegally, and his paymasters are the Russian mob. But it gets weirder. Two weeks in, somebody offers Davda the chance to play an indoor version of cricket, India's national obsession, in a bare-walled Moscow sports hall for around 700 bucks a month. He leaps at the chance, even if, by his own omission, Davda is not much good at the game

himself. The games are even stranger than they're advertised to him. There's a league, but nobody appears to know what it is, and everything is broadcast by a host of expensive cameras to streaming links on a local betting site. His isn't the only league. Across the former Soviet block, Russian gambling sites are streaming so-called ghost games in sports like volleyball, soccer, table tennis,

to dark corners of the web to be bet on. Among them is one of the world's largest digital sports books founded by a trio of men, including a former Kremlin intelligence official named Sergei, Kashkov. It's long been known to stream dodgy in illegal events like cop fights and even kids sports and its associates include men accused of drug dealing and money laundering. Its name is one ex-bent. Two months later, Davda returns to Molliport, a little less in the red and a lot more confused, but Mishu isn't done with him. If Davta can set up a cricket tournament

in Mollipur, the gang could pocket some of the crazy money being gambled on cricket by Indians themselves, supercharged by the popularity of the Indian Premier League, or IPL, one of the richest sports events on the planet. And not coincidentally, the focus of multiple match-fixing and betting scandals since its 2008 foundation. Indians are already streaming amateur matches to 1X Bet's live pages, but they're terrible, no better than the dreadful limitations in Europe in which Davta himself took part, and so obviously rigged that no Indian were confuse them with the real deal. Make something that looks and feels like the IPL and Daftamite full punters and bring home a slice of his nations estimated $150 billion illegal gambling

black market, however smaller slice that is. That means players, uniforms, equipment, broadcast tech and toughest of all, a stadium from nothing. It's a herculean hairbrain task. But Davta is still drowning in debt. His business is sunk and Misha is on his case. In truth, he doesn't really have a choice. Davta says yes. What happens next is one of the strangest sport crime capers ever. And earlier this year, I travelled to Mollipur to report it.

Welcome to the Underworld podcast. Hey guys, and welcome to the show that dies headfirst into the Merck of Global Organised Crime. I'm your host, Sean Williams. I'm joined by my journalist and documentarian companion, Danny Gold. We've been all over reporting goodies, baddies, and most everybody in between. And today is drum roll cricket time. Finally, I can hear Danny's size, but after about a year on this story, and it published earlier this month for Sports Illustrated,

we're going to talk about a piece I thought was going to be a fun jaunty caper, but ended up winding through Russian organized crime, digital sports books, money laundering, triads, and even a former FSB agent dead on a Swiss hospital gurney. This one got real fast, real quick. So, yeah, I think we're going to do it in kind of a Q&A format. You were going to ask me some questions about it because it's like, it's a pretty weird piece at it. Yeah.

You didn't end up paying what I thought it was going to be. Yeah, we'll get into the narrative of it too. But I legitimately can't think about the story better suited for us. You know, I mean, Russian mafia, gambling schemes, cricket. it like if you added it in bathtub meth, it would literally align with all of our interest in one package. It's just perfect subject matter. But yeah, this was part of Sean's like insane string of incredible long form magazine pieces this past month. If you haven't read them, there was one in Harper's on the Nepalese weed trade, one in Rolling Stone about a conman that con Sean

as he was writing the story about the con man, which is crazy. If you haven't read them, please do, but also listen to this entire podcast first. As, always bonus stuff on patreon.com slash into a world podcast or on iTunes for $5 a month. Also, I want to shout out our dude Podus, who I met for the first time when he was working at a booth at the Italian festival in Little Italy, and I was $5 short on a sandwich, and he hooked it up. So if you don't want to pay us $5 a month for bonus episodes, if you see me in the streets, you can give me $5 for a sandwich, and like that counts as well. But also YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Rate, subscribe, vote, volunteer, send us Best Buy gift cards that you've stolen from people,

you know, the usual stuff. But yeah, sorry, I'm rambling. Sean, first question. If you in the future hear about any fixed games where bets are being taken, even if it's cricket, can you let me know ahead of time? Yeah, I will. Actually, interestingly, like, for this piece, I have found out there's like one of the greatest Twitter accounts that I've seen, and it's in French.

and I can't remember the name of it, but I've got it written down somewhere. And it's a guy who just flags up like the last minutes of sports matches around the world where things are going clearly wrong. So it's like, he's like, Malaysian Premier League, Quala Lumpur FC, a 5-0 up. It's nearly 90 minutes time. So you might want to get your bets on on the 5-0 win, stuff like this. Which is pretty, I mean, the whole world is suss as. But yeah, I found out some little trick. and places to look.

And there's all those folks that court side as well, right? So they stand there or sit at games and they just like kind of make bets and they try and pown all of the digital sports books. Some, because I hate them. There's a really good BBC documentary about it. So yeah, this like this crazy story

of an Indian fake league actually explodes into a whole world of just kind of skullduggery and all kinds of weird stuff. Yeah. But I'm going to try and stay on the beat because Sports Illustrated want me to do some more stuff, and I'm in Asia or New York editors think I'm in Asia,

so I'm going to try and get out to, I don't know, Southeast Asia or something and see what the deal is with all of these fake stuff. And also, if people want to know more about the kind of stuff that this leads to, we did that show a while back with Lindsay Kennedy and Nathan Southern, where they were talking about slave armies in Southeast Asia, like casino, syndicates, all tied into the meth trade. this is all part of the same world. A lot of those slave armies,

they're working on these digital betting sites. It's like really, really weird. So, yeah, if anyone wants to look that up more, check out that episode and then look up somebody called Alvin Chow. I'm not going to say anything about him on this episode because it probably gets sued, but he's a pretty crazy guy. I try a dude in Macau.

We got fitted up recently. So, yeah, this is a pretty big subject. And not many people are writing about it too. Like there's a few magazines. There's a magazine in Norway called Jossima, which does amazing stuff about corruption in sport. Interpol, you know, brings out a newsletter. But apart from that, there's nothing. And it's making billions and billions and billions of dollars.

It's crazy. It's like a complete blind spot for the media. How do you even hear about something like this and like, how do you begin cracking it? How do I hear that there's a fake cricket league in India? Yeah. Yeah, it was like, I remember seeing it. It was reported everywhere, but it was kind of like one of those things where the international media were doing a bit of stenography. And I think the times of India, actually the guy who would end up being my fixer, a guy, well, actually, I won't say his name because he was doing a bit of a dodgy one off the side of his work.

But a guy in Gujarat had been kind of picking up the pieces from all the police reports and putting together this story about the fake league. And then all these Western outlets, I think the New York Times and the Guardian picked it up. And they were all saying, oh, this is like just such a cool story. These plucky villages have screwed over all of these betters. I think it was in three Russian cities. I think it's Voronej, Moscow and somewhere else, I can remember. And I think because of the stuff that's going on in Ukraine, it kind of made the idea of screwing over Russian betters was a bit of an.

easy win. And they just used all of the police reports, but pretty much the moment I got out there, it just shows that they had not been given the full story, which was kind of annoying, to be honest. I was really out there to try and find out more about this fun plucky caper, but it didn't really work out that way. So is this one of those things where your fixer did all this work and you just translated it into English, basically? Well, this is one of those situations where my fixer did a bunch of work and then took me to the police station and then the minute I spoke to the police I was like well hold on that doesn't fit with that and you didn't speak to any of these guys and you didn't it was really really weird they were like laughing and joking the cops um I got to so I went

to the police station in a place called Messana which is the nearest kind of big city to Mollipur which is this tiny little village like a few thousand people and all this is kind of north of Andabad, which is the big city in Gujarat, home to five, six million people on the west side of India. Never been out that way before. It was really cool. But the second the police started talking, they were kind of contradicting their own reports. The police reports, they just printed out a bunch of police reports for me that they hadn't shown the media, which is pretty weird. And none of it was kind of adding up. And the more I spoke to people that were actually involved in it, they were like, Well, the police never spoke to me.

I never even spoke to the cops. So the cops had won this kind of regional award for breaking this case because I think it made international headlines, so everyone was really pleased with them. But the second they gave me a bunch of phone numbers and said these are the numbers of the people in Russia who had helped this guy set it up. It turned out they hadn't even called them,

and they just kind of put out, I think the most basic like milk toast call for help to the Russian authorities, which is obviously going to go nowhere. So when I started calling those numbers, that's when this sort of true story started to take shape and it became a lot darker, a lot quicker than I had imagined. And then on day one, I went out to see this like millet field that these guys had turned into a stadium, which was pretty nuts. It was just in the back of nowhere. And we completely by chance, we met the main guy himself, Davda, the star of the intro here. And he was just like terrified, man.

Like he was not acting in a way that you would expect somebody who'd found this kind of short-lived fame for this funny story to be. And so I was prodding him and poking him with these questions. And it soon became clear that he was not the guy or the mastermind that we had been led to believe. So yeah, it kind of came tumbling out from there. But there's a lot more to it than that even. Yeah, so I mean, that was one of the things I think that struck me. Like, you mean to tell me there's tons of completely fake leagues of different sports and rigged sporting events being conducted and bet on all over Russia. And like there's some league that also allows you to bet on kids sports because I actually, I would bet on that league.

But the other stuff is a little too rigged for me. Yeah, like kids boxing, stuff like that, cop fighting. completely legit. There's marble runs and there's like Fusball leagues. There's all kinds of weird shit. Like you can't access Onex Bet in the US or the UK or here in New Zealand

because they don't really like to touch countries that can actually do them any harm with the law. But, you know, if you've got half a brain you can get around that kind of stuff. And if you check out the live section on OneX Bet's website, you will find an absolute ton of really weird things going on.

And like some of them are just made purely to be streamed, such as the cricket leagues in Russia. I mean, you know, I don't need, I don't think anyone needs telling that Russia isn't massive on cricket. And if you go to the live section of Onex Bet's website, you'll find tons of live games going on. Some they don't even bother streaming. Some they're just like updating a scoreline for teams that clearly don't exist.

they're just making up. That's incredible. It's pretty wild. And no one seems to give a shit. There was like, there's a league that I found on there because I thought I better do my due diligence and make sure that this stuff is actually rigged. And if you know anything about cricket, right,

there's guys holding the bats. I don't. Right. So imagine you're holding a cricket bat's got a handle and a big fat wooden bit that you hold, a bit like a baseball bat. But there's guys that are playing where they're holding the bottom of the bat.

as if it's like a hockey stick and they're trying to hit the ball. This is supposed to be a legit cricket league and there are people who have never played the game. And then as we went, I guess as I went further into my research and found the guy who was Misha, he was sending me a bunch of screenshots

from stuff that he was like broadcasting live at that moment from a city called Yaroslava, which is just outside of Moscow. And there was a bunch of guys I think he was, it was purported to be a US versus UK cricket match with guys called like Alfred Arthurston and like William McDonnell and shit like this. And you look to them, they're all clearly Russian guys. They don't know how to throw the ball. They're just like kind of chucking it like a baseball. So like what is what is the

point of these things? They're so, so weird. Jocelyn, the magazine that I spoke about before, they geolocated some of these weird events. And they found sports halls in Moscow, I think Kiev, I think it was Kiev, and there was another one in Minsk. So it's all like former Soviet Union cities. They're just like whitewash balls,

no spectators. And this is like basketball, volleyball. It's such a weird corner of the internet. But then folks that I spoke to that follow this stuff say that they've tracked like millions of dollars going through online. wallets just for this like random shit. I'm surprised there's that much that much gambling going on but I also didn't know that the Indian Premier League cricket is massively successful and generates a ton of money but I guess

that makes sense with it being like you know the most populous country in the world and also the most popular sport there I would assume but yeah you know I'm someone who I don't even pay that much attention to the NFL anymore but I still bet parley is like three times a week where I have no idea what's going on I'll just listen to my brother or bet a bunch of overs because gambling is really fun. Like, it actually rules. And I totally get why random weirdos. That's what we can take away from that.

How are we not sponsored by any gambling apps, by the way? I mean, this is like a missed opportunity. I actually will spend money on you and lose it too. But, yeah, this story is going to get advertising or not from this episode. I kind of instructed him over the guys. Six-leg parlayers, baby. Nothing better to spend $10 on. But this guy, this guy doved it, right?

he ends up in Moscow, kind of royally screwed, like, so many migrants who are lied to and all that stuff. But he gets recruited basically into some sort of like Russian, not the Russian mafia, but Russian organized crime, yeah? Yeah, so he gets, like, he gets picked up by human traffickers in his village. And they're like, okay, you can get to Malta. Obviously, guy from Western India doesn't know where the hell Malta is. And so they send him to Moscow first. This is actually a huge, huge human trafficking route. people from Gujarat, it's quite well documented now that they've been found on the borders of the US in Canada.

People have been going through Mexico. A lot of people are going through Gujarat. I think it's between 60 and 70 million people. So it's the size of a pretty decent, you know, pretty decent sized state. Very poor, very arid, not a lot of money getting injected into it. Loads of Modi's like, you know, Indian Renaissance stuff isn't getting funneled into these areas. So people are leaving And he just became one of these

I think there is some crazy stat like 20 or 30,000 people have left in the last year or something like this illegally There was a recent case that a friend of mine in India reported where a whole family of Gujarati's were found dead on the Canadian US border like frozen to death because obviously they don't know where they're going

So this guy just becomes a stat and he just like ends up in a part of eastern Moscow. I think I can say the name of it. I think it's called Izmailovska. And it's known as a kind of weird combination of historic buildings, old Orthodox churches and quite nice lakes, but also obviously your massive Soviet platinum ball blocks and everything like that. And he ends up... Plus. Let's go!

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Actua more rapidly and supera Clarity and Flownays at 1 at 24 hours. Parade. Adelante. In a toy factory, stacking shells essentially, just boxing up toys

and doing stuff like that in a warehouse. Sleeping in bunks with a bunch of other guys from South Asia by night. And he's kind of a skinny guy, little pop belly.

doesn't really like hauling a bunch of shit for his job every day. So when he gets told he can play cricket for a living, he jumps at the chance. And then he ends up playing one of these strange matches. I'll put a bunch of screenshots and stuff. People can see some pictures online at the story as well. The link, obviously, we'll throw on this episode. But he just gets into this really weird world,

which is quite well established there. And as part of the story, I spoke to the head of the Russian cricket. It Federation, who is Indian, of course. He's lived in Russia for like 20, 30 years. And he was saying, yes, this is a massive problem. And it's really hard to parse what we're trying to do, i.e. grow the game in this sort of alien culture,

with people using the game as a Trojan horse to traffic bunches of people. And as I carried on doing my reporting, I heard about a guy called Zubir, who was essentially a kind of like trafficking fixer, and he would hook up these games for the betting websites. And he told me that there was kind of local palais. There was two forms of games. So there was a legit game, which would be held in Moscow, and there was a completely fixed, made-up game, which would be held in Yaroslavl.

So Moscow is kind of shorthand for legit, and Yaroslavl is shorthand for very not-leg. it, and it was the latter that one expect was getting into. And yeah, so this is a little more real than that by Burke Kreiser story, right? So he runs with these mob guys for a bit in Russia, doing the fake games, doing some real games. And then they're like, hey, why don't you go back to India and do it from there too? But also fake or real or what? Yeah, so this is when it gets a bit complicated. He heads back a couple months after he starts playing these weird cricket matches in

Moscow. And when he gets back, he gets tapped up by Misha, the former fixer in Moscow. And Misha has worked with a bunch of Indian guys who have tried and failed to set up fake IPL leagues in India. Now, they've done one example of this before they get to Davda. And it's in a place called Myrout, which is near Delhi. And I spoke to the guy who tried to set that up, a guy called Ashok Chaldry. he was arrested as part of this whole scam. And he said they tried to set up TV cables and audio broadcast equipment, but monkeys kept chewing through the cable. So they kind of couldn't make this stadium that the Russians wanted to make

to broadcast their fake league. And the reason that the Russians want this fake game to look like the real deal is twofold. So one, you've got this advent of the IPL, the Indian Premier League, And it's the second most lucrative per game tournament on earth. It's just grown out of nothing. It's become unbelievably monetized and commercial. And, you know, players' kits look like a sort of F1 outfit. Every single act of the game is sponsored.

Every single match is packed to the rafters. And this is India, right? So you've got games of like 120,000, 130,000 people at a match. and this is on one side. So obviously, people are betting in droves on this huge, glitzy tournament, except that all forms of betting in India are illegal. So they're doing it all on the black market. And so on the other side of this coin,

you've got these weird fake games in Russia. You've got folks broadcasting kind of backyard tournaments and games in parks and just shitty. bad looking cricket online to this weird site, OneX Bet, just trying to claw whatever betting money they can get. So the Russians think, okay, if Indians are betting billions of dollars on the real deal, and there's such a huge clamor for it in India that they're willing to bet on any old Tom Dick and Harry that makes a cricket league that doesn't even look real,

if we make something for a few thousand bucks that looks real, then we can hook in enough punters in Indian. India to get a slice of that estimated $150 billion. So I hope this is making sense, but that is where the logic comes about for this guy to then build this pretty insane stadium and league. And he sets this whole thing up himself. Like, it's pretty genius, actually. It's, it's like beyond genius.

It's incredible. He does it in a couple months. He rents this field that's used by a millet farmer. It's in the middle of nowhere. It's not even in Molliport. It's like a few minutes out of town. like a couple miles drive outside of the main village. And then it's crazy, right?

So he gets all of these kits for the teams. That's just the beginning. He plows the field into like a nice pitch. He makes the kind of strip that you would play cricket on like a kind of, I don't know, I guess what you would bowl to the batter between. And then he gets five HD cameras, two LED. screens, walkie-talkies and halogen lamps, all from Amdabad, which is hours away. And then he sets it all up.

So you've got floodlight pylons and you've got broadcast equipment ready to go. You've got a boundary line. You've got this like kind of snipped-in shed that he does commentary from. And by the way, one of the guys they bring from this failed league in Mirate called Saki Bseifi, he's a guy that can kind of do ventriloquism. or like imitate people's voices rather. So they get him to imitate India's most famous cricket commentator. They get other guys to sort of broadcast stuff with the LED screens between Russia and Mollipur and back again

so that they can fix the games as to whatever Misha wants at the end of a telegram messaging app. So in two months with almost no money and really nothing to go on, he builds a full cricket stadium and then he starts paying pals and sort of pour farmhands in Mollipur five bucks a day to play. And for them it's a lot of money that's like twice the daily wage

and he'll pay them per game which will last a couple hours max. So they're getting up to four or five times their daily wage. They're jumping at the chance to do it. And then he starts streaming these games. And from my reporting, I saw some of the kind of back and forth on telegram between Misha and the folks in the commentary box. And it's like, you want them to lose now?

You want this team to lose now? Okay, okay, do it now. I don't want this team to win. I want this team to win. So it gets pretty weird pretty quickly. And all the players realize that they're playing in a kind of fixed game because someone's going to hit a home run and then the umpire signals that he's out. instead and it gets a bit weird. And so the players realize really quickly what's going on,

but they, they like the color of money, so they don't mind too much. But then after a while, some weird guys start showing up alongside the villagers who were just intrigued about what's going on. And, yeah, it goes south pretty soon after.

And yeah, they get caught pretty quickly, right? Yeah, it's only, I think it's like a week or two after they begin. So they're playing like, inverted commas

quarterfinal match and these this kind of half dozen guys or a dozen guys that have been sitting on the boundary of the field suddenly get up and start running at the players

and everyone starts scattering but only one of them is really running away and it's Davda there's this really kind of funny moment where I spoke to one of the players who was a proposed captain of one of the teams

and he said that he had like once someone had smacked the ball out of the pitch into the long grass beyond and he goes into the field to go and fetch it and then he sees these cops running onto the pitch and he decides to like lay down in the long grass and try and hide from the cops and then he realized like what the hell I don't I haven't even done anything wrong one of the cops comes over to him and says no no don't worry about the ball and they and they shut everything down um but that's when the official story kind of ends

and that's when the cops kind of very quickly sew everything up and don't really look into anything else but obviously there's tons more coming on. So I take it that there's always been these sort of like scammed games or you know

fixing it in this sport in general but I guess the advention the invention of like you know streaming and gambling online gambling easier just kind of cracks us wide open yeah? Yeah I mean cricket is

supposedly a gentleman's sport but it's like so riddled with match fixing and betting scandals that it's crazy. It's probably the most corrupt sport on the planet. I found out, I didn't actually know this, but I found out when I was researching this story that it was even the laws of the game were only formulated so that they would clear up betting disputes between English aristocrats in like the 1700s. So that was the whole point of the game being codified was to settle bets.

and there have been tons and tons of scandals all throughout. Like, there's a Netflix documentary out now about a massive Indian scandal in the 90s. Anyone who knows cricket knows about it, like down to the careers of some of the biggest players on the planet. And then, you know, going into the early 2000s, there was a bunch of Pakistani players, including the national captain who were arrested in England trying to throw games. The reason for all of this is that, I guess similar to other bat and ball sports, you could, bet on tiny, tiny details so you can bet that a ball is going to be a wide or

a no ball. I mean, you don't need to know what these things are, but they're basically like, you know, you can basically bet on balls and strikes and walks and bulks and everything in cricket. Nice. And that means that... I love a good prop bet, dude.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll bet on the coin, at the Super Bowl, I'll bet on the coin being flipped. You know what I'm saying? Like, I love a good prop bet. So I'm glad to see our Indian brothers do as well. Oh, yeah. But that means you can just like, if you want to rig a game, right?

If you're a boxer, you're going to have to like hit the deck or get knocked out. But in cricket, you can just like step over a line by an inch and you can fix a small part of the game. So it makes everything so easy and harder to detect. Yeah, yeah. But the dude, really the center of this though is, right, some Russian oligarch or some gambling tycoon or a mafioso or Putin descent who gets murdered, like all three.

I mean, what's his story and how did you unravel this? Yeah, so one, it was, the key was getting through to Misha, right? Because the Misha hadn't been spoken to by the cops. I think they were scared about shaking a Hornets Nest or like getting involved in what the real story might be in case they had to do some proper work. But once that guy started telling me that he was, he was essentially a broadcast engineer and he was helping people set up fake games in Russia for one expert. and then suddenly one ex-bet is involved. And there's a bunch of interesting information on this company. They're like just insane levels of open crime involved.

I mean, they enter poorer markets where the government can be bought or people can be, you know, cops can be bought off. They don't operate in the majority of sort of rich Western nations because they know they'll get poned. but they do advertise hugely in like the biggest sports in the world. So not only cricket, but they've, one expert is sponsored like they still sponsor FC Barcelona. They sponsored, I think Tottenham, Chelsea, Liverpool in the UK until the, I think there was a 2019 report about them doing stuff on cop fighting and drug deals and all kinds of shit and they got shut down.

But they still sponsor teams in South America. I mean, Asia, forget about it. That's what I'm going to do my next story on because that's, just a complete free-for-all. So they advertise and they get people looking at their brand in, say, the US and Spain and France and England. But they don't operate there. So they operate in like Angola and Ghana and Argentina and Singapore

and like strange territories. So if you can get through to them, you can make the bets. So it's just like money laundering on an unbelievable level because the way it was described to me was, okay, why do you then make these fake games, right? You've got this fake betting site. You've got all these weird events. Why even do that? Why not just set up a legit betting company or even don't get the licenses, just do it illegally?

Well, the thing is, if you are the mob and you own the betting site, then you get the rewards from the games that you set up. So you can help all your friends longer than all their cash. So you're just like, well, you don't even have to bet on anything. It's not a bet. All the money is going to come back to me, whether you lose it or win it. So I don't even have to put money into a front business, if I'm a mobster. I can just bet on this fake cricket game that my pal in Moscow has set up. And whatever comes back out of it is clean money.

So it's sort of like money laundering turbocharged. And this is a huge issue in Asia. Like it's an even bigger issue. But by and large, there are two forms of this. illegal betting world, there's Eastern Europe and there's triad stuff in Eastern South Asia. So they don't really touch each other and one ex bet has clearly decided it's going to be the one going for this massive Indian market. None of the Chinese companies have tried it. So they kind of carve it up

in a bit of a cartel way. And so this is really, a bunch of people I spoke to folks at Interpol at the UN and they were telling me this is just like the best way of laundering money these days. That's why so many of these weird betting sites are popping up all over the world. I mean, just the other day one got caught out trying to sponsor Wolverhampton Wanderers in the Premier League, 7-677. Don't have a website, don't have a phone number, don't have an email, don't have an address. But they're still like pumping money into professional sport. So yeah, it's pretty, pretty nuts. I want in. Yeah, I mean, it's a great way making money. We should do it. And if 6-7-7-8-7-5 or whatever wants to sponsor the pod, then

come get it. We should crack this code. But I actually, I love this part, though. You faked being a British investor interested in setting up a cricket league in Russia. Bonjour, compadre. It's the Priceline negotiator. How do I negotiate so many great travel deals? My greatest gadget. The Priceline app. It's got hotel deals, flight deals, rental car deals, all of those deals in a bundle, deals, game day deals, concert trip deals. No one deals more deals than price line. Hold your horses. There's more. The app let you filter hotels by neighborhood, vibe, star level, and amenities like pools and spas and beach fronts. Wait, I'm not done. Stop cutting me up.

Price line! Whatever your thing, it could be anything. Canva helps you make that thing a thing. Canva is a simple online tool thing. It's a way to design. sign with our magic AI tool things. You can social media your thing, generate images or videos of your thing, make decks for presentations to show your thing. Whatever needs to be done for your thing, Canva can make it an even better and bigger thing. Canva, the thing that makes anything a thing. Yeah, well, I mean, once I realized there was this guy, I think he was described to me as a Pakistani, but that's just what all Indian guys in crime say about guys they want to like put on the hook because I don't like Pakistanis, but

this guy was... Don't get us involved. Do not get us involved in that back and forth, dude. There's a few things. There's a few, there's some smoke I don't want and India, Pakistan, either, I just, I don't want that, dude. Oh, it's just a bunch of fun. I mean, one of the things that was kind of

stinky about the police reports is that they hooked the entire ring on like three random Pakistani guys and they're like, oh, it's the Pakistani guys in Moscow. It's just the Pakistani guys. like they're they're kind of corrupting our lovely Indian citizens. That was like the first red flag.

And at least two of the Pakistani guys I spoke to, he just had completely no idea what was going on whatsoever. So I spoke to the head of the Russian Cricket Federation. He didn't really want to get involved because he's like, these are pretty dangerous guys and I'm in Moscow. Fair enough. But this Zubir character that pops up in the story, I just decided that the best way of doing that,

I mean, he was going to shut down any kind of conversation I had. So I just wanted to see whether he would be open to the idea of setting up a fixed league for some rich British businessman in Yaroslav or the city near Moscow where all this stuff goes on. And yeah, he was pretty open to it. And he was the one that was telling me there were these two kinds of games. You know, you can set up a real one where people don't fix the games or you can set up a complete fixed bullshit one. and so I had a conversation with him on telegram for weeks. I think it was in the end. We've got all kinds of juicy information out of him.

But I didn't want to throw him in under the bus. But yeah, he basically confirmed that this stuff is going on in a big way. And between him, Misha and the Federation chief who was saying, yes, this is a huge problem. You've got pretty damning evidence that one ex-bet is not only making, these fake cricket leagues to London money, but it's also trafficking South Asian men into Europe in order to do so. And that's kind of another level of criminality that I don't think it's really been reported before, even by Jossama and a couple of others that have spoken about these so-called ghost games.

But everyone I spoke to who said that's well within the purview of a company like OneExbet. and I guess that comes down to who it's run by and what it's all about because it really is organized crime. And the reason I'm happy to say this is because they're not litigious. The story's out there, they haven't even had to come back on it. They don't give a shit. You're really scared. You're really scared about being sued right now, aren't you?

I know, not again. Christ, not another 100 mil. Are we going to have to go through the podcast episodes and just like the censor stuff now because you're tired of your retainers are getting worn up or whatever? it is. Yeah, I'm pretty up for going to L.A. to fight the case for Rolling Stone, though. That would be funny as hell, but maybe not one expert. I don't want to go to Moscow.

Something tells me the case isn't going to last much longer, and then we can hopefully do an episode about it and talk about everything. We'll see. Yeah, I'm actually kind of interested now in that guy's journey home, the guy who was trafficked first ends up stacking those boxes, then he gets home to India somehow from Russia? Did he just

let him fly back, or did he escape? and like, I don't know, how the hell do you get back from there? From Russia. Right, the guy who, the original guy, Daftah, right, who goes there, this traffic there, lied to, ends up in the factory, then he ends up back home in India, right? Yeah, he just goes back to his home village, Mollipur. And I can't say for like certainty how these folks get on his case afterwards. I don't know how those conversations look like.

But the way that he described it to me was that he was definitely under duress. So the way I'm imagining it is the Russians already have this sort of small clique of guys who are trying to set up a league like this near Delhi. And they've got this guy, Davda, who they clearly see something in, and they're like, okay, well, if you set up a league in your village all the way over the other side of India, then you can take home a bit of this gold and you can have a bit of treasure to go with it. And you can get yourself out of debt. So I guess he was under enough pressure financially.

and they could kind of crowd him with their guys very quickly in his home village. And every question that I tried to ask him about, you know, how much pressure you under or did they make you do this? He's kind of like nodding and winking in a little ways, which made me, you know, he wouldn't say outright, but I think he was under a great deal of stress from these gangsters to set up this league. I don't think that saying no was ever going to be an option for him. And I mean, he needed the cash anyway, so he had to do it.

it. I mean, there's no other way that he was going to make a few grand, uh, legally in that village where there's absolutely nothing going on. I mean, it's like 40-something degree C. No one even steps outside in the summer. So you could barely do anything. Um, it's pretty amazing. They even played cricket, to be honest, I'd be dead. But yeah, I think he was, I think he was a poem. But I think he was a very clever pawn. He managed to set up this sort of equipment and all this stuff, but I think he was a victim ultimately. And it kind of showed that in the wake of the reporting of the story, all of the players, all of the people who'd be involved in it, didn't get involved in the media circus. They kind of went to ground. Some of them left town. They were really

scared. And there's only, I can't see a reason to be scared if there wasn't a kind of level of organized crime laying over the top of it, threatening them. So where do things end up now? Well, I mean, the league gets shut down. Davta spends a short time in prison, as do the two umpires that he gets that were definitely in on it. And then a couple of the other guys that tried to set up the leagues in Delhi or near Delhi, they end up doing a short amount of time as well.

But everyone just gets off basically, and they get tiny minor misdemeanors. The players are let go immediately. Everything's shut down. The cops have still got all the equipment and stuff in the police station. And it gets swept under the carpet, and that's the end of it. Except that if you go online now, there's just as many games, fake games being played as there ever were. No one touched one X bet. I was the first person to report about Onex bet and the link between them and Misha and this Indian League.

And actually... Ooh, look at you. I know. give me, give me brownie points. You deserve them, dude. I'm pro Sean. Oh, thanks. And, but if you, but the World, the cricket world cup started a couple of days ago in India.

And Onex bet is present. And it sponsors teams through this fake site, well, not a fake site, but it's like a news website. I'm doing air quotes called Onex Bat, see what they did there. and they are all over cricket still. And what they do is, because 1X bet can't operate in India because that would be illegal, they set up 1X bat, which is a news website, which people can access on telegram and on a pretty shoddy website. But what you do is you go to the news about the games,

but then you can click a link and you can get through to a kind of embedded version of the betting website. So just leaves one level of distance between the betting and the cricket. And that's enough for the Indian authorities not to bother chasing them. Because, I mean, everyone that I spoke to in India says that people pretty high up get paid off by these betting companies. And when you think about the amount of money that a public official gets in India compared to the amount of money running through these sites, you can pretty easily formulate a kind of picture of how people get bought. off. I met a cop in Amdabad that showed me all these

like illegal apps and betting sort of websites that are endorsed by some of the biggest stars in the country like Bollywood stars and TV presenters all completely illegal but they kind of just fly under the radar because the authorities have given up trying to really police it. So there is gigantic amounts of money

flowing through this sport. And you know this was one attempt to build something pretty wild and outlandish and try and catch on the coattails of the IPL. But there's tons and tons of stuff going on every day in India that's completely part of this black market and the cops aren't picking up. And one X bet seems to be doing just fine as well, except for its founder. And that's kind of another part of this story that gets even more dark and macabre.

What is the other part of the story? Well, I was halfway through finishing a sort of third or fourth draft this piece and then somebody sent me a link to a pretty obscure website and it was that sergey kashkov one of the founders the former fsb intelligence operator in a city called brianzk which is right near ukraine um he shown up dead in a swiss hospital in a zurich private hospital uh he'd been getting an MRI scan a pretty routine scan and the official line is that he had an allergic reaction to the, I think the thing called a pigment that they used for the

scan, and he died right there and then. He was 42 years old, fits a fiddle, had a record of questioning the war in Ukraine. I think he was half Ukrainian, half Russian, and some of the founders involved in OneXBet had sort of been on the lamb officially from

Russia for evading tax for years and years. They set up in Cyprus, and they became slightly controversial, even in Russia for doing so. So they weren't just poning the authorities in like, you know, Ghana and India and the US and the UK. They're actually also on the run from Russian authorities.

And then this guy goes for a routine checkup, you know, he's a fucking billionaire. So he goes for a routine checkup at this super, super fancy Zurich hospital. And he winds up dead, young. And some people lump this in with the sort of, slew of oligarch deaths that have occurred across Russia in the last couple years since the war broke out. I would too. I think it's extremely rare for something like this to happen.

A friend of mine who's a doctor in the UK said that the chances of someone dying like that are so close to zero. They're basically impossible, not least in a sort of swish, upscale private institution in the middle of Switzerland. So it seems like this guy was murdered. But we don't know for sure. So that was just another part of this strange twisted tale that popped up right in the middle of reporting it all.

I couldn't get through to them. I got through to a guy in London who just assured me that no games were rigged but couldn't tell me why. And that was my only kind of interaction with Onex bet. But it's a really weird tale. And if anyone can actually read or hear I understand Russian. There's a really good Forbes, Russia, YouTube documentary about this company that is a lot more critical and sort of deeply investigated than the expect from Russian Forbes.

Although I guess Russian Forbes has its own history in Moscow with people getting assassinated. But yeah, if you want to read that, you want to check that out. That's really good. My next bet is extremely odd. They're based in Limassol in Cyprus and they are still at it. Nice. Well, dude, thanks for doing this. We're still out there doing real shit. At least you are. For the most part. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, bonus content, as always, patreon.com slash the Underworldpod podcast. Underworldpod.com for the websites, YouTube, TikTok, all that. Anything else, man? I think we're going to do some stuff about the Rolling Stone story soon. I think I'm going to be able to talk about that. That's kind of another wild, weird.

one. So yeah, hopefully we can do some stuff on that in the coming week or two because that is another thing that swatled up my life for a long time. It's out there. Read it. Anyway, until next time. Some follow the noise. Bloomberg follows the money because behind every headline is a bottom line. Whether it's the funds fueling AI or crypto's trillion dollar swings, There's a money side to every story. And when you see the money side, you understand what others miss. Get the money side of the story. Subscribe now at Bloomberg.com.

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