Blow to the fixing of soccer matches with 23 detainees

Joint coup by Europol and the National Police against match-fixing. Investigators have dismantled a network that operated in grassroots football matches, from the “field” of the RFEF, the Gibraltar National League and the Andorra League, the Ministry of the Interior reported on Thursday. The so-called ‘Coniferous operation’ adds 23 detainees in Badajoz, Cádiz, Ciudad Real, Córdoba, Tenerife and Ceuta, which are added to the 21 arrests that were made in the first phase of the operation last November.

Currently around thirty football matches are being investigated for this case, the vast majority between April and June of last year, of 1, 2 and 3 RFEF, former 2B and Third, which are semi-professional, in addition to matches involving teams from the principality of the Pyrenees and the British colony. Of the 44 detainees in the two phases of the operation, 20 are soccer players, almost all of them from lower categories (12 in November and 8 in recent days). Among those arrested there is only one player, from the FC youth academy, who did come to play a forty game in another first team. The benefits generated by the framework are estimated at more than half a million euros.

Some of those arrested sold their gaming accounts so that members of the organization could place online bets on rigged matches, earning between 4,000 and 24,000 euros per gaming account.

The investigation began after the arrests and searches carried out after the first phase of the operation, in which 21 people were arrested in the provinces of Cádiz, Badajoz, Seville and Almería for allegedly belonging to a criminal organization, corruption between individuals in the sports field and scam the game operators.

The analysis of the data allowed the researchers to delve into the modus operandi of the organization, identifying both soccer players who would have participated in the fixing of soccer matches and people who were in charge of opening online gaming accounts and bank accounts for which the organization’s money circulated. This system of creating accounts and transfers made it difficult to trace the capital and link those investigated.

The modus operandi of the criminal organization consisted of four different phases. A first stage in which the athlete provided internal information about the soccer teams, which provided the members of the organization and bettors with a competitive advantage in terms of knowledge of last-minute line-ups, discards, the game system, and other aspects that are publicly known to us.

In the second phase, the concert of sports fixing was carried out, creating encrypted communication groups formed by the leaders of the organization and the athletes to carry out the fixing and obtain great economic benefits.

Online and face-to-face

During the third stage, sports bets were carried out both online and in person at bookmakers. When the bets were processed online, they used different identities to avoid interrelation between the members of the criminal network and when they were done in person, the bets were placed for small amounts to avoid that the subsequent collection of the prize generated the issuance of certificates for the Public Treasury by the game rooms.

To end the fraudulent actions, the leaders of the organization distributed the profits generated during the bets between the athletes involved and the rest of the plot.

The investigation, in addition to the Police and Europol, has involved the Global Betting Market Investigation Service (SIGMA) dependent on the General Directorate for the Regulation of Gambling, the UEFA Anti-Fixing Unit, as well as La Liga and the Royal Spanish Football Federation.