How Russian Mobsters Masterminded a Crazy, Fake Cricket League for Betting Riches: Sean's in the Field!
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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. Shodavda 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 disaster. 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 Davda he can make bank working on a Mediterranean island named Malta, but he can't fly there direct. Instead, Davda 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 admission, Dav does 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 bloc, 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 and illegal events like cop fights and even kids sports. And its associates include men accused of drug dealing and money laundering. Its name is OneXBet.

Two months later, Davda returns to Malipur, a little less in the red and a lot more confused. But Misha isn't done with him. If Davda can set up a cricket tournament in Malipur, 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 his 2008 foundation. Indians are already streaming amateur matches to 1xBets live pages, but they're terrible, no better than the dreadful imitations in Europe in which Davta himself took part, and so obviously rigged that no Indian would confuse them with the real deal.

Make something that looks and feels like the IPL and Davda might fall punters and bring home a slice of his nation's estimated $150 billion illegal gambling black market. However small a slice that is. That means players, uniforms, equipment, broadcast tech and, toughest of all, a stadium. From nothing.

It's a Herculean harebrained task. But Davda's still drowning in debt, his businesses are sunk, and Misha is on his case. In truth, he doesn't really have a choice. Davda says yes. What happens next is one of the strangest sport crime capers ever. And earlier this year, I travelled to Malipur to report it. Welcome to the Underworld Podcast. Underworld Podcast

Hey guys, and welcome to the show that dives headfirst into the murk of global organized 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, drumroll, cricket time. Finally, I can hear Danny's sighs, 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're going to ask me some questions about it because it's like,

It's a pretty weird piece, and it really didn't end up being what I thought it was going to be. Yeah, we'll get into the narrative of it too, but I legitimately can't think of a story better suited for us. You know what I mean? Russian mafia, gambling schemes, cricket. If you add it in bathtub meth, it would literally align with all of our interests in one package. It's just perfect subject matter. But yeah.

Yeah, this was part of Sean's 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 con man, 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 thenoirpodcast 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, that counts as well. But also YouTube, Tik TOK, Instagram rate, subscribe, vote, volunteer, send us best buy gift cards that you've stolen from people, you know, the usual stuff. But, um, yeah, sorry, I'm rambling. Sean, first question. We, we, yeah. 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? Um,

Yeah, I will. Actually, interestingly, for this piece, I found out there's 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 the last minutes of sports matches around the world where things are going clearly wrong. So he's like, Malaysian Premier League...

uh, Kuala Lumpur FC, a five nil up, uh, it's nearly 90 minutes time. So you might want to get your bets on, on the five nil win and stuff like this. Um, which is pretty, I mean, the whole world is sus as, uh, but yeah, I, I found out some little tricks and,

places to look. And there's all those folks that courtside as well, right? So they stand there or sit at games and they just kind of make bets and they try and pwn all of the digital sports books. Some because I hate them. There's a really good BBC documentary about it. So yeah, there's 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 you want to know more about the kind of stuff that this leads to, we did that show a while back with, uh, 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 and it's like really, really weird. So yeah, if anyone wants to look that up more, check out that episode, uh,

uh, 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, um,

He's a pretty crazy guy, a triad dude in Macau who 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 Josimar, 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 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 yeah,

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 villagers have like screwed over all of these betters. I think it was in three Russian cities. I think it's Voronezh, Moscow and somewhere else. I can't remember. And I think because of the stuff that's going on in Ukraine, you know,

It kind of made the idea of screwing over Russian bettors 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. Yeah.

I got it. So I went to the police station at a place called Messana, which is the nearest kind of big city to Malipur, which is this tiny little village, like a few thousand people. Um, and all this is kind of North of Anderbad, which is the big city in Gujarat home to five, 6 million people, uh, 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 and,

The police reports they did, they just printed out a bunch of police reports for me that they hadn't shown the media, which is pretty weird. Uh, 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. Cause I think it made international headlines. So everyone was really pleased with them. Um,

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 happened.

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. 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 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, cockfighting, completely legit. There's marble runs, and there's like...

foosball leagues, there's all kinds of weird shit. You can't access OneXBet 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 if you've got half a brain, you can get around that kind of stuff. And if you check out the live section on OneXBet's website, you will find an absolute ton of really weird things going on.

Some of them are just made purely to be streamed, such as the cricket leagues in Russia. I don't think anyone needs telling that Russia isn't massive on cricket. If you go to the live section of 1xBets website, you'll find...

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 stuff. 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 their website

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. It'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 and stuff that he was broadcasting live at that moment from a city called Yaroslavl, 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. Yeah.

So like what is the point of these things? They're so, so weird. Joss and Martin 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...

whitewashed walls, 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 millions of dollars going through online wallets just for this random shit. I'm surprised there's 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 the most populous country in the world and also the most popular sport there, I would assume.

But yeah, 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. It actually rules. And I totally get why random weirdos would bet on... How are we not sponsored by any gambling apps, by the way? This is a missed opportunity. I actually will spend money on you and lose it too. I'm not sure if we're going to get advertising or not from this episode. I'm kind of intrigued to know how it goes.

Six leg parlays, baby. Nothing better to spend $10 on. But this guy, this guy Davda, 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 picked up by human traffickers in his village. And they're like, okay, you can get to Malta. Obviously, a 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 and 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-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 said.

in India reported where a whole family of Gujaratis 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 ends up in a part of eastern Moscow. I think I can say the name of it. I think it's called Izmailovskaya.

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 Plattenball blocks and everything like that. And he ends up 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 from South Asia by night.

And he's kind of a skinny guy, little pot 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 of the story as well. The link, obviously, we'll throw on this episode. But he just...

it 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 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 the

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 a kind of local parlay

there was two forms of games. There was a legit game, which would be held in Moscow and there was 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 legit. And, uh, it was the latter that one expect was getting into. And, uh,

Yeah, so this is a little more real than that Burt Kreischer 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.

They've done one example of this before they get to Davda, and it's in a place called Meerut, which is near Delhi. And I spoke to the guy who tried to set that up, a guy called Ashok Chowdhury. 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 work.

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 commercialized.

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, 1xbet, 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

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 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 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 Mollipore. 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, right?

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 Ahmedabad, 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 snip tin shed that he does commentary from. And by the way, one of the guys they bring from this failed league in Merritt called Saqib Saifi. He's a guy that can kind of do ventriloquism or like imitate people's voices rather. So they get him to imitate in

India's most famous cricket commentator. They get other guys to sort of broadcast stuff with the LED screens between Russia and Malipur 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 poor farm hands in Malipur 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

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

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 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 it goes south pretty soon after. And yeah, they get caught pretty quickly, right? Yeah, I think it's like a week or two after they begin. So they're playing like an inverted commas quarterfinal match and 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 around

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 once someone has smacked the ball out of the pitch into the long grass beyond, then he goes into the field to go and fetch it. And then he sees these cops running onto the pitch and he decides to lay down in the long grass and try and hide from the cops there.

And then he realized, like, what the hell? 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 shut everything down. 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 fixing it in this sport in general. But I guess the invention of streaming and gambling online, gambling easier, just kind of cracks us wide open. Yeah, I mean, cricket is...

It's supposedly a gentleman's sport, but it's so riddled with match-fixing and betting scandals that it's crazy. It's probably the most corrupt sport on the planet. 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 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. There's a Netflix documentary out now about a massive Indian scandal in the 90s. Anyone who knows cricket knows about it, down the careers of some of the biggest players on the planet.

And then 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 can 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, you can basically bet on balls and strikes and walks and bulks and everything in cricket. Nice. And that means that I love it. Yeah. Yeah.

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? 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 hit the deck or get knocked out. But in cricket, you can just step over a line by an inch and you can fix a small part of the game. So it makes everything so easy and hard to detect. Yeah, yeah.

But the dude at really the center of this, though, is some Russian oligarch or some gambling tycoon or a mafioso or Putin descendant who gets murdered, like are all three. I mean, what's his story and how did you unravel this? Yeah, so the key was getting through to Misha, right? Because Misha hadn't been spoken to by the cops. I think they were scared about shaking a hornet's nest or getting involved in what the real story might be in case they had to do some proper work. 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 1xbet. And then suddenly 1xbet 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 pwned. But they do advertise hugely in like the biggest sports in the world. So not only cricket, but they've, one expert has sponsored, like they still sponsor FC Barcelona, right?

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. Uh, but they still sponsor teams in South America, uh,

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 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 like 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 launder 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 I get, whatever comes back out of it is clean money. So it's sort of like money laundering turbo charged. And this is a huge issue in Asia. Like it's an even bigger issue, but it's,

By and large, there are two forms of this illegal betting world. There's Eastern Europe and there's triad stuff in East and South Asia. So they don't really touch each other. And 1xbet 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...

I am a bunch of people. I spoke to folks at Interpol at the UN, uh, 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, uh, sponsor Wolverhampton Wanderers in the premier league, seven, six, seven, seven. Don't have a website, don't have a phone number, don't have an email, don't have an address, but there's still like pumping money into professional sport. Um,

So yeah, it's pretty, pretty nuts. I want in. Yeah, I mean, it's a great way of making money. We should do it. And if 67875 or whatever wants to sponsor the pod, then come get it. We should crack this code. But actually, I love this part, though. You faked being a British investor interested in setting up a cricket league in Russia.

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 put on the hook because they don't like Pakistanis. But this guy was...

Don't get us involved. Do not get us involved in that back and forth. There's a few things. There's some smoke I don't want and India, Pakistan, I just don't want that, dude. It's just a bunch of fun. One of the things that was kind of stinky about the police reports is they hooked the entire ring on three random Pakistani guys and they're like, oh, it's the Pakistani guys in Moscow. It's just the Pakistani guys. 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 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 Zubair character that pops up in the story, he's,

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 Yaroslavl, the city near Moscow, where all this stuff goes on. And yeah, he's 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.

Uh, and so I had a conversation with him on telegram for, for weeks. I think it was in the end. Um, we've got all kinds of juicy information out of him. Uh, but I didn't want to throw him in under the bus, but yeah, he, uh,

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 1xbet is not only making these fake cricket leagues to launder 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 has really been

reported before uh even by joss ma and a couple of others that have spoken about these so-called ghost games um but everyone i spoke to said that's well within the purview of a company like one expert 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 they're

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? Yeah. I know. Not again. Christ. Not another hundred mil. Are we going to have to go through this podcast episodes and just like the sensor stuff now because you're, you're tired of your, your retainers are getting worn up or whatever it is. Yeah. I'm, I'm pretty up for going to LA to fight the case of Rolling Stone though. That'd be funny as hell. But, um,

Maybe not. 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 they 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, Davda, right, who goes there, there's 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, Malipur. 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, who they clearly see something in and they're like, okay, well, if you, if you start set up a league in your village all the way over the other side of India, then,

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... 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. I mean, there's no...

There's no other way that he was going to make a few grand legally in that village where there's absolutely nothing going on. I mean, it's like 40 something degrees C. No one even steps outside in the summer, so you could barely do anything. It's pretty amazing. They even played cricket, to be honest. I'd be dead. But yeah, I think he was a pawn. 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. Davda 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 1xbet. I was the first person to report about 1xbet and the link between them and Misha and this Indian league.

Ooh, look at you. Yeah, I know. Give me brownie points. You deserve them, dude. I'm pro Sean. Oh, thanks. But the Cricket World Cup started a couple of days ago in India, and 1xbet 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 here.

called 1xBat. See what they did there? And they are all over cricket still. And what they do is, because 1xBat can't operate in India because that would be illegal, they set up 1xBat, 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 it 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, um, you can pretty easily formulate a kind of picture of how people get bought off. I met a cop in Ahmedabad that showed me all of these for 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. Um,

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 1xbet 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

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 of this piece and then somebody sent me a link to a pretty obscure website and it was that Sergei Kashkov, one of the founders, the former FSB intelligence operator in a city called Bryansk, which is right near Ukraine, he'd shown up dead in a Swiss hospital, in a Zurich private hospital, and

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 use for the scan. And he died right there. And then he was 42 years old. Fit as a fiddle. Uh,

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 lam officially from Russia for evading tax for years and years. They set up in Cyprus, Germany,

and they became slightly controversial even in Russia for doing so. So they weren't just pwning the authorities in 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 of 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,

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 1xbet, but...

It's a really weird tale. And if anyone can actually read or hear or 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 you 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 underworld podcast on the world pod.com for the websites, YouTube, TikTok, all that. Anything else, man?

I think we're going to do some stuff about the Rolling Stones 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 swallowed up my life for a long time. It's out there. Read it. Anyway, until next time.