ESIC Commissioner issues lackluster reasoning for radio silence on NA matchfixing scandal

"I don't sit day-to-day with my investigatory workload going 'Oh yeah, perhaps I should revisit this thing that happened two years ago,'" Mr. Smith said during an interview.

Ian Smith, Commissioner of the Esports Integrity Commission (ESIC), was recently interviewed by INSITE to discuss topics ranging from the ongoing investigation into match-fixing in North America to the coach bans handed out by ESIC after the spectator bug was discovered in 2020.

In the interview, Mr. Smith made attempts to justify ESIC's two-year silence on the North American match-fixing investigation they made public in 2020, citing a lack of credible evidence, funding for the investigative body to continuously look into the matter, an inability to make headway with certain betting operators who refused to provide details of betting information, and his own focus moving on to current issues as reasons why no sanctions had been issued. He also stated that the body had at one point found enough evidence to charge "five to six" individuals, but because the players were no longer actively playing the game, they chose not to.

These reasons, while partially explaining the lack of results from the investigation, do little to justify the complete radio silence regarding the issue from the esports watchdog for two years, nor the repeatedly failed promises of updates and investigative releases that supposedly would implicate players involved in the aforementioned match-fixing. Insult to injury is added when Mr. Smith later in the interview brushes off the lack of updates and of further investigation by saying he needs to be reminded and held accountable by third parties to continue looking into the matter, and adds that his focus isn't on what has happened in the past, but rather on the immediate present.

The looming specter of a hammer poised to come down on the heads of up to 34 North American players has haunted the region for over three years now, and it is truly unclear after this interview if Mr. Smith doesn't understand the impact that the prolonged investigation — and almost more importantly, complete radio silence — has had, or if he simply doesn't care.

Numerous organizations have been hesitant to sign players in the sub-top of North America for fear of unknowingly being associated with matchfixers, while some of the alleged matchfixers have moved over to VALORANT and found massive success without any punishment for their actions. The integrity of the lower leagues suffered too, and with almost no information to go off of, fans could only question if the matches they were watching were legitimate or not.

That isn't to disregard the difficulty in making progress in the investigation itself due to some of the reasons talked about by Mr. Smith. However, there is simply no reasonable excuse for the number of times that Mr. Smith or ESIC has stated an update or release is coming in mere days, yet failed to deliver. It's even more disappointing that ESIC neglected to notify the public of the reason for the delay in their investigation for over two years, and on top of that did not provide any comments to journalists despite repeated inquiries as to the status of their investigation.

Broken promises

Four days ago, August 23, marked the two-year anniversary of the last public update issued by ESIC regarding the North American match-fixing investigation. The esports watchdog's investigation into the matter was first revealed in September 2020 following months of rife community speculation regarding players in ESEA MDL (now ESL Challenger) rigging the outcome of matches for profit from betting websites. After nearly six months of silence regarding the investigation, Mr. Smith revealed that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had gotten involved in the matter and that findings from the first subsection of the investigation would be made public in "ten days to two weeks," adding that the commission had "really good corroborating evidence" of wrongdoing and that the players would be banned "for a very, very long time."

"The first part we'll deal with quite quickly, because... we're dealing with idiots, basically," Mr. Smith had said.

Five days later and thanks to a concerted effort from multiple journalists, a transcript of a recording was released to the public, with the original leaked recording already being directly provided to ESIC by the same journalists. The transcript revealed a conversation between Sebastian "⁠retchy⁠" Tropiano, Carson "⁠nosraC⁠" O'Reilly, and Kevin "⁠4pack⁠" Przypasniak in which the then-Rebirth trio discussed plans to fix two ESEA MDL matches. The trio were among five players suspended by ESEA following the publication of the transcript as ESIC looked into the matter.

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Leaked recording exposes match-fixing discussions in ESEA MDL

Ten days came and went. Two weeks came and went. Mr. Smith's promised report never surfaced. Nearly four months later, a response to the release of the transcript finally arrived — notably, not the first subset of findings that Mr. Smith had previously spoken of — wherein the watchdog issued five-year bans to retchy and 4pack, as well as a reduced 111-day ban to nosraC for failing to disclose knowledge of corrupt conduct to ESIC. The other two players mentioned in the recording were not charged.

The watchdog stated at the time that it had dealt with this specific case separately from the rest due to details being made public and referred to this release of bans as an interim update. It stressed that this was not the final outcome of its large-scale inquiry, which included "34 additional and currently still ongoing investigations."

That was on August 23, 2021.

Read more

Former Rebirth duo handed five-year bans by ESIC

Radio silence

It's been all quiet from ESIC since then, both publicly and in requests for comment, regarding the NA match-fixing investigation. It has left the entire scene, and particularly North America, in a lurch. Instead, the only releases we saw from them pertained to the spectator bug and the coaching bans that were subsequently handed out. ESIC showed poor handling of that situation too, given that they crumbled when threatened with litigation by Nicolai "⁠HUNDEN⁠" Petersen and that most of the leg work in the case wasn't even done by them. Rather, it was Michal Slowinski, a tournament admin, and Steve Dudenhoeffer, a software development manager at ESEA, who handled that, but that is a whole separate story in and of itself.

So what did Mr. Smith, after two years of silence, have to say when he finally spoke up about the investigation?

He began by making it clear that the allegations ESIC received absolutely justified an investigation. To begin looking into those allegations, the watchdog needs to work with betting operators to verify that the bets were placed, the value of the bet, who placed them, and from what region.

"We had a lot of betting that indicated the outcome was known before the bet was placed or when the bet was placed, that it had been bought somehow or had been arranged," Mr. Smith explained. "If it's credible, that's what triggers the investigation, then they look at the match action."

He then touched on where this case "fell down," diving into the point when the FBI got involved.

The FBI had their own priorities

"When law enforcement gets involved, and I'd say particularly in the United States and the FBI in this instance, they have a very different priority to ESIC. We are regulating the players, the sport, the participants. What they are primarily interested in is finding out which betting operators were offering markets illegally to United States residents and citizens. What they are interested in is how are these guys placing bets from places where betting is illegal.

"They want to prosecute the betting operators who are operating illegally in the United States. A lot of the to-and-fro between law enforcement and ESIC is much more about the betting operator than about the players because, you'll appreciate that in many cases and being somewhat pejorative about this, the players are nobodies to the police. They're not high-profile people, they're not sexy. Law enforcement only generally worldwide pursue cases where they perceive to be a public interest. They are prohibited by their rules of evidence from providing anything back to us. So whatever they find out they can't tell us, they can't provide that to us until there is a trial, a criminal trial, and the evidence is presented at the trial.

"What happened in a vast majority of the old MDL cases is that the betting operators who were operating illegally in Canada and the United States at the time would not cooperate in the provision of evidence to us. A lot of them were Bitcoin operators with no license at all. Whilst we were able to contact probably four or five of them, none of them were prepared to provide us with the necessary client information for us to link the players to the bet."

Later in the interview, Mr. Smith had some more to add regarding that last point. "We are still hopeful that relationships with these betting operators improve to the point where they feel comfortable giving us the betting evidence we've been asking for for the last two years. The guys who operate in the crypto space, apart from one who we deal with frequently, they have no interest in engaging with us because they jeopardize their illegal position in the United States. Nobody wants the FBI banging on their door, and any indication that they accepted customers and bets from the United States in that period would expose them to criminal prosecution in the United States, end of story."

Inconclusive evidence; inaction from ESIC

Mr. Smith then explains that the match evidence, which they had expert CS:GO analysts go through, was "inconclusive," and that while most of their experts were prepared to say some clips looked dodgy, they weren't able to fully rule out poor play as a whole.

"By the time we felt we had enough potentially on another six players to actually proceed on betting evidence that we had and the match play [gameplay from demos], all of those players were no longer actually active in the scene at all, and the remaining who were active were ones where we simply did not have enough to prosecute the cases, " Mr. Smith continues, revealing that ESIC failed to take action on players who they even determined to clearly be match-fixing. "Those cases remain open, as silly as that sounds."

Mr. Smith explains that he expected betting operators to willingly cooperate and provide information more than they did. "It looked open and shut — and still does, look I still completely believe that these cases were fixed, I'd put my mortgage on the fact that these matches were fixed, but that is a very, very different thing from actually prosecuting and banning players based on my belief as opposed to rock-solid evidence that would stand the scrutiny of external bodies.

"Particularly the point of being in the United States, is the litigious nature of society and the way that the legal system operates, if you get something like this wrong and some guy sues you for loss of earnings over the next god knows how long, loss of reputation, that kind of exposure would bankrupt ESIC in one case, so it's not something that we can do on a whim."

So why the silence?

Mr. Smith is then directly confronted and questioned as to why ESIC hasn't provided a single update on the investigation in the past two years, and why this is the first time we've heard news about it.

"I guess this comes down to me, in a sense, relying on people like you actually asking me this question because being proactive on old investigations when we have got 100s of new ones is a question of resources, time, and focus," Mr. Smith says. "We are a radically under-resourced organization, relative to our workload. So, my focus individually is always on 'what are we doing now,' not on 'what did we do last week, last month, last year,' which is a fault – I’m explaining and excusing.

"That’s not a good thing, but it is one that we are addressing now, in terms of resourcing. We need more people, and we need people who are exactly in the position to identify that we haven’t updated the website, to say 'Hey, I looked at the website and we haven’t done anything on this for 6 months to a year, whatever.' I don’t have that luxury, at a personal level, and neither do the few people who work for us yet. Bluntly, the increase in resourcing, both at a human and money level, is what we need to serve the community in a way that the community deserves. In the meantime, I rely, as the community does, on guys like you asking me the question.

"I’m perfectly prepared to answer the question, but I don’t sit day-to-day with my investigatory workload going; 'Oh yeah, perhaps I should revisit this thing that happened 2 years ago.' I hold up my hands that that is not satisfactory and we're building towards what is satisfactory very rapidly."

Mr. Smith stated toward the end of the interview that changes would soon follow in ESIC, indicating that the structure within the watchdog would be changing in the coming months and that they were addressing their resource issues. He also pointed toward a mass increase in ESIC's caseload from COVID onward and said the sheer number of issues overwhelmed him, with that being one of the reasons they haven't "proactively" communicated with the community. It is, however, hard to place faith in the promise of change in the future after Mr. Smith and ESIC have repeatedly failed to deliver on timelines and promises of change from previous announcements.

After all of this time, for the first words on the situation to arrive through a small podcast interview, and for that news to essentially reveal they have not continued to work on the investigation and need to be reminded to even tell the public about it... it's quite frankly insulting, and overall damning for the few people who remained hopeful that ESIC had been working toward a resolution for the investigation over the past years.