The Esports Integrity Commission(ESIC) has confirmed today that they’ve launched an investigation into match-fixing in the MDL tournament series conducted by ESEA, a member of ESIC. The investigation was launched after the organization received “suspicious bet alerts” eighteen months ago through their global integrity monitoring framework and multiple times since then.
“Investigations into match-fixing are complex and require significant cooperation between a variety of international stakeholders comprising of betting operators, government bodies, law enforcement agencies, and industry stakeholders,” ESIC states in their website. “Accordingly, as complexities are often not immediately resolvable, investigations into this sort of fraudulent activity take significant time, effort and resources to complete in an appropriate manner.”
During the time of the update, ESIC had already conducted “an extensive and ongoing investigation” into the match-fixing allegations over the past eighteen months. They have been using various investigative tools to link the suspicious bet placers with the teams and players involved in manipulating games.
ESIC has claimed that the investigation is already in its concluding stages and that they’re expecting to give an update regarding this situation within a span of four weeks since this statement.
“As of the date of this update, ESIC is maintaining 15 ongoing investigations which we consider to be of significant concern to the industry.”
