Attempted Match Fixing Tarnishes Skin Betting Site

This should unfortunately not come as a massive surprise to anyone. A tier three CSGO team was picked up last November by “CSGO.One”. The team, previously known as Orgless, were made up of a mixture of Hungarian and Danish players. They signed to CSGO.One after finishing 3rd at the ESL South East Europe Championship Season 2.

Fast forward just two months and the CSGO side has announced its departure after they were approached by the owner of the skin jackpot website asking them to fix the outcome of their matches in the Operation Kinguin online tournament.

The players, represented in a statement by Andre “BARBARR” Moller, stated that they had left immediately as he alleged that CSGO.one had proposed to throw their upcoming fixtures. BARBARR made it clear that the offer was never a consideration from the players who immediately distanced themselves from it and blew the whistle on the skin jackpot site.

Thanks to the integrity of this team of, relatively mediocre players, another major match fixing scandal was avoided. Great credit has to be given to these players for doing so. In the circumstances, the matches they were asked to throw meant very little in the grand scheme of things. In walking away, they are giving up a salary from their organization.

On the other side, the deplorable attempted act by a skin gambling site has gone unpunished. At the date of publication, over 31,000 jackpots have been played on their website. Not only do such websites operate questionably in the first place, but one has now had the nerve to hire a team for the sole purpose of profiting from it by having them throw matches. Sites such as EZSkins and CS:GO Lounge have also housed professional teams, however there is no suggestion that they have been involved in anything similar.

The iBuyPower fiasco is very much still in people’s minds as well as the Virtus Pro late-betting scandal (where one of their games online games was played earlier in the day than its advertised time, prior to being rebroadcast was brought forward, so they backed themselves on CSGOLounge to win the match, essentially defrauding other bettors). Such situations risk the integrity of CSGO and reduce confidence that bettors can have that the sport is legitimate.

CSGO.one denied the accusation in an interview with topfrag.rip and stated that the players misinterpreted a question from their management regarding the ex-iBuyPower scandal and used this to leverage their way out of the organization so that they can accept a better deal from another team. There is also some scepticism from community members, given that Viktor “flash” Tamás Bea previously played in a Volgare side who, on multiple occasions, were involved in matches with suspicious betting patterns that were forfeited in questionable circumstances, where the team cited apparent DDoS attacks. This came in positions where they were extremely unlikely to win, with CS:GO Lounge stating on one occasion that the players had bet on themselves. Where matches are forfeited, skin bets are refunded to the original bettor.

Whilst skin betting sites enable bettors to act anonymously and do not submit their bet data to any fraud monitoring software, there is little that can be done to prevent match fixing aside from hoping that other players have the same integrity as BARBARR’s companions.