launched an investigation into betting patterns<\/a> in the division.<\/p>\nAs the season came to a close, the fixing was an open secret in some dressing rooms. Fans were suspecting their own players, accusing them from the stands.<\/p>\n
The situation couldn’t last. The net was closing in. Swaibu’s final Bromley fix – ensuring they lost an April 2013 fixture away to Maidenhead by two clear goals – bordered on farce.<\/p>\n
Swaibu gave their striker a clear run on goal to score the game’s first. Into the second half, he stayed rooted to the ground as they scored again to lead 3-1. A team-mate scored in the 82nd minute to make it 3-2. Two minutes later, Swaibu held a needlessly high line, chased back aimlessly and allowed Maidenhead to make it 4-2.<\/p>\n
An incensed team-mate who wasn’t in on the fix was sitting on the bench, telling the manager that something suspicious was unfolding in front of them.<\/p>\n
“It was the first time it had been that blatant and obvious and I didn’t want to face the dressing room,” Swaibu says.<\/p>\n
“I was a mouse. The bubble had popped in that moment.<\/p>\n
“When I walked into the dressing room I couldn’t look up. It was silent, everyone looking at me.<\/p>\n
“The only thing I could hear was the gaffer – a grown man in his fifties – weeping.<\/p>\n
“I didn’t get in the shower, I just went straight to my car.”<\/p>\n
Swaibu left the club two games later, at the end of the season.<\/p>\n
He wasn’t the only fixer who realised the National League South had come under too much scrutiny.<\/p>\n
A clutch of players left Hornchurch – another team in the league – and travelled around the world to play for Southern Stars, a lower-league team based on the outskirts of Melbourne, Australia.<\/p>\n
Their arrival didn’t go unnoticed. Sportradar – a company hired to monitor and maintain the integrity of sports events – had suspicions. The players’ social media posts from Australia, featuring extravagant holidays in Bali and high-end nightclubs, only heightened them.<\/p>\n
The Australian police were tipped off and the Southern Stars’ dressing room, clubhouse and even goalposts were rigged with hidden microphones.<\/p>\n
Undercover officers posed as fans, phone calls were intercepted and bank transfers examined.<\/p>\n
It led to a string of convictions, a clutch of leads and, ultimately, a sting operation by the National Crime Agency in south London.<\/p>\n
By then, Swaibu could well have been out of the game, both legal and illegal.<\/p>\n
He says he had saved up around \u00a3200,000 from fixing football.<\/p>\n
And, at 24, playing football seemed to be over. Two short-term deals with Sutton and Whitehawk led nowhere.<\/p>\n
“But I was addicted at this point, something was pulling me back in.”<\/p>\n
One of Swaibu’s contacts had been tapped up by a new group of fixers – a gang trying to break into match-rigging and put together a network of players to pull it off.<\/p>\n
Swaibu had his suspicions. The new fixers didn’t seem to know the rules. They seemed naive and inexperienced, with little idea of what was possible.<\/p>\n
They dropped names of other match-fixers they had worked with, when discretion and secrecy were key to Swaibu’s previous bosses.<\/p>\n
Some were also white, British and middle-aged, an unlikely profile for hi-tech gambling conspiracies, invariably leveraged from Asia.<\/p>\n
Swaibu wanted to believe though. Because if they were new to fixing, they could be fleeced.<\/p>\n
Swaibu says he took a photo of his local five-a-side team and told the fixers they were players in his pocket. He invited his new contacts to a League Two match between AFC Wimbledon and Dagenham and Redbridge and told them it was rigged. It would end, Swaibu said, in a 1-0 win for Wimbledon.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\n
Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Bookmakers, usually protected and in profit thanks to margins and finely-tuned odds, were losing on National League South. They were seeing floods of money on certain teams’ games from newly-opened accounts located all over the world – tipsters who would bet exclusively on the English sixth tier and with unerring accuracy. More money was reportedly […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4392,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4391","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-top-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4391","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4391"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4391\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4393,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4391\/revisions\/4393"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4392"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4391"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4391"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4391"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}