Was a CSGO Held Event Just for Match Fixing?
Recently, Jake covered a CSGO match fixing scandal involving a match between NA’V I Academy and a mysterious team named Skin Ogres.
The latter team got smashed in their first map against NA’V I A, suddenly popping off in the second game after a mysterious 1,000,000 ruble (Russian currency) bid on them for the map. Another bid onto NA’V I in the following map suddenly saw Skin Ogres revert to their terrible form for the final map. It gave NA’V I the win but left a sour taste in the player’s mouths.
Jake’s follow-up investigation detailed some disturbing facts about this match and the CSGO tournament organizer and sponsors. To this writer, the whole CSGO tournament is suspicious and seems like a ploy to launder money in the CIS.
Sketchy Sponsors and Teams
First and foremost, the event had a weird lineup. Many well-known and established teams such as HellRaisers, DreamEaters, Syman Gaming, and the Copenhagen Flames attended. Despite these big names, we saw two completely unknown teams: Skin Ogres and Axis, the former, which includes a VAC banned player in Dream3r. Both teams never played a tournament before this cup, yet managed to get an invite to the tournament.
It gets more suspicious as you go further down the rabbit hole, too. The tournament’s sponsors show some other weird data points. L33T Studios sponsored the tournament along with a partnered company called Overman. Both have a non-existent following on Twitter and dead websites. The latter’s site has a static page that says coming soon. Neither of them has much of a Twitter following either, with only 16 followers for L33t and not a single one for Overman. While that isn’t too unusual, most companies in the CIS region tend to be active more on social media site VK, neither of them appears to have a presence there, only further raising suspicions.
There’s also the title sponsor of the whole event, LEGENDS.BET. They only have 58 followers across Twitter, Facebook, and VK, and don’t do any betting on their website. None of the links at the bottom for the “FAQs” or “terms of service” pages work which further raises suspicions. These companies barely exist and yet can host a $20,000 tournament?
From Skin Ogres suspicious bets to several clips of highly irregular maneuvers in-game by the team, there are several reasons to believe something fishy is going on. Also, LEGENDS.BET invited six of the eight teams, meaning someone else invited in the last two: Axis and Skin Ogres.
This CSGO event has all the telltale signs of a money-laundering scheme and match fixing, things that aren’t sadly as uncommon as you’d expect down in the c-tier scene. The event seemed suspect. It should be looked into by Valve to make sure their title isn’t used to move ill-gotten gains around. At the time of this writing, the company has yet to make a statement. We’ll keep you updated as the situation develops. However, it may be a while before we hear anything more about this.
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