Reports are surfacing that suggest a Counter-Strike: Global Offensive game from last tear was fixed, and that pro-team iBUYPOWER threw a game and subsequently people connected to the team took advantage of some suspicious betting.
The report over on The Daily Dot suggests that iBUYPOWER's shock 16-4 defeat at the hands of NetcodeGuides.com was not down to tiredness after travelling and unfamiliarity with the map (as suggested), but instead was down to the game being fixed and with irregular betting the cause.
The match was played last August as part of the CEVO Professional Season 5. After the game there were accusations of foul play, and since then further evidence has emerged. Notably there was some text messages from the ex-girlfriend of former iBUYPOWER's Derek "dboorn" Boorn. These were posted on a forum earlier this month, and among the messages Boone said that "they intentionally lost a match this past week".
Boorn hasn't denied the messages, but did say that he had "zero interest in participating in any type of revenge mission she has going." TheDailyDot says that they are satisfied with the authenticity of the texts in question.
Duc "cud" Pham, a Vietnamese player known on the North American pro-CS:GO circuit is also implicated, with the report linking him to several of the people who allegedly made money from the betting. Pham denies the allegations.
Finally there's the admission from Cloud9 player Shahzeb "ShahZam" Khan, who confirmed that he had been tipped off about the fix by NetcodeGuides.com founder Casey Foster.
"He made it very clear the match was going to be thrown," Kahn said. "I didn't want to get involved with any of it but I changed my bet, as I thought would be logical at the time while also sharing this information with a friend whom I assumed to have bet the same.
"I regret first and foremost not contacting league officials and telling them what was going to happen. I didn't have all the details and didn't know any specifics as I was not the one engineering any of this. Also, given my past immaturity at the time, I wasn't sure if anyone would believe me."
Kahn said Foster told him to keep quiet because it "would be a huge blow to the North American competitive CS:GO scene and cause iBUYPOWER to lose their sponsor. So I denied everything, I stayed quiet, and at the end of the day I took the heat of the crosshairs when this first surfaced months back through an article very similar to this one."
"I know I wasn't the only person to have known, but I was definitely in a position to do what was right and come forward with this information and I didn't because I was scared. I'm sorry. I've never been involved with any type of match fixing and I never will be, neither would any of us at Cloud9."
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Thanks, MCV.