An international network based in Spain rigged bets with the delay in the broadcast of the Qatar World Cup

The first alarms went off in March 2022. Bogdan V., a 39-year-old Romanian bettor residing in Cabanillas del Campo, province of Guadalajara, had aroused suspicion in the internal control services of Codere, one of the large betting houses.

The player had played more than 2.9 million euros in just two years. But he always used to follow the same pattern, betting on basketball games and greyhound and horse races.. However, suddenly his activity had skyrocketed into an unusual discipline: table tennis.. In two years his interest in this sport had been residual. Suddenly, in just one month, he allocated more than 13,500 euros to this discipline, always with combined bets and doubling his average of previous personal bets.

The legal services of the betting house crossed data with the providers of sporting events, investigated the histories and detected signs of fraud, suspecting that there could be a plot to fix ping-pong matches.. Suspicions were reinforced with a bet in one of these games held in Brazil, an apparently minor event, but which hid a suspicious back room.

Gap in the system

For this reason, last year the lawyers of the betting house put it in the hands of the National Court, denouncing “reasonable evidence” that indicated that the player under investigation knew about the fixing of the matches on which he bet, as stated in the document. sent to court reporting the case.

The door was opened to an investigation that a year later, under the name of Operation Mursal, would emerge with the arrest of a group of people involved in a cartel organized for the alleged massive rigging of sports bets.. With tentacles in the table tennis circuit, in which one of the detainees had been a professional player, but with the ability to scheme in the highest international competitions, including the World Cup in Qatar or the UEFA Nations League.

This is clear from the arrest warrant of one of the main defendants and alleged ringleaders, Yavor A., resident in Malaga and detained in the United Arab Emirates and extradited to Spain last September.. The incarceration order issued by the Court of Instruction number 3 of the Provincial Court, to which EL MUNDO has had access, describes how the organization took advantage of a gap in the telecommunications system to gain an advantage and always bet on the winning horse.. They knew the result thanks to their infiltration and anticipation tactics by hacking the signal, thus multiplying the profits.

Alleged criminal “cartel”

The reconstruction of the events investigated by the National Police points to the existence of “two criminal organizations that maintain their independence, but associate with each other”, sharing accounts and information and forming an alleged criminal “cartel”.. An alliance designed “to strengthen its position in a world as complex as that of criminal organizations dedicated to match-fixing,” maintains the order issued by Judge María Tardón.

To concoct this alleged scam on the betting houses, they arranged agreements with athletes (professional table tennis players) and, in parallel, in other sports they took advantage of the delay between the sporting event on which they were betting and the broadcast signal with the one that the gaming operators have, with which the bets of the rest of the online players are articulated. This allowed them to “bet on variables that they were certain had just occurred.”. They knew before anyone else what was happening and moved the money just before.

The investigation supervised by the National Court indicates that the network managed to access the signal in real time in stadiums thanks to the use of “large satellite dishes” and “coding obtained from a Telegram group called 'Hack Sat Feed'”. They took advantage of this technique “in international events, such as Chinese League soccer matches or soccer matches of national teams in the Europa Nations League, a tournament organized by UEFA.”

four league games

In addition to this ploy, the organization exploited these delays by employing narrators sent to the stages where the matches on which they bet were taking place.. “The purpose,” explains the judge, “was to defraud the gambling operators by placing safe bets on circumstances that the bettors know had just happened thanks to the speech of a prominent person in the football stadium.” .

Although it has not been possible to identify all the narrators, it is noted that they acted in “various soccer matches played in the Qatar Soccer World Cup”, with cross calls between Spain and Romania.. And that this tactic of the announcers was also used in at least four matches of the Spanish League: narrators infiltrated the stadiums of Celta, Betis, Villarreal and Sevilla, a circumstance absolutely unrelated to the clubs.. The narrators were compensated with 250 euros paid through Bizum. The same technique was used in a Copa del Rey match between La Núcia and Valencia in January of this year.

The organization allegedly used the identity of people who transferred their data to act as money “mules” and thus hide the identity of the leaders of the network.. The investigation also indicates that the cartel managed to corrupt several people employed in the betting houses themselves and in the intermediary companies for the digital flow of money (the so-called payment gateways), although only one has been identified, a woman who in One year, between September 2021 and September 2022, he received 46,957 euros from one of the main defendants.

Also in the repechage

Using this technique, the organization achieved significant profits in international matches. Thus, the investigation has documented how in a single play-off match for the Qatar World Cup they managed to win 13,000 euros thanks to the gap between the signal and reality. Peru and Australia faced each other in June 2022 to achieve one of the highly disputed places in the world's highest soccer competition.

In that match the Australians won a very tight penalty shootout against the Peruvians, who also started the shootout winning, which made them betting favorites. Ultimately, Australia won 5-4 in a long exchange of shots. The police investigation has traced the account where the money went, which was then distributed between the two leaders of the two branches investigated.