Child’s play – josimarfootball.com

A joint investigation by Josimar and Bellingcat has found that 1xBet, official betting sponsor of FC Barcelona, PSG, Serie A and CAF, is organising and giving odds on hundreds of thousands of games per year involving fake teams and children as young as 14.

By Philippe Auclair, Andy Brown, Jack Kerr, Sam Kunti and Steve Menary, in collaboration with Bellingcat

Controversy has been a constant companion of 1XBet from the very beginning, ever since its three founders, Roman Semiokhin, Dimitri Kazorin and former cyber intelligence major Sergey Karshkov (*), had to flee Russia to escape arrest and prosecution for running an illegal sports betting operation from their base in Bryansk, only to relaunch the 1xBet brand in Cyprus and build it into one of the best-known and most profitable online gaming platforms in the world.

1xBet’s founders: Dimitri Kazorin, Roman Semiokhin and Sergey Karshkov.

Remember the Imitation games? As reported by Josimar, 1xBet was offering in-play odds and live streamed videos of fake sporting competitions. In these “tournaments”, you would see teams like “Dortmund”, “Liverpool”, “Madrid” and “Barcelona”, all of them fake teams with familiar names, which is quite something considering that 1xBet is a global partner of FC Barcelona, along with PSG, Lille Olympique, Serie A and the African football confederation (CAF).

In June 2022, 1xBet’s then-holding company 1XCorp was declared bankrupt in Curacao, following a class action filed by customers whose winning had not been paid. The decision was confirmed by the Supreme Court in The Hague in January 2023.

What Josimar and Bellingcat’s joint investigation has discovered goes way beyond any of our previous findings, both in scope and in nature. 

1XBet organises, live streams and takes in-play bets on hundreds of thousands of “games” played round the clock, 365 days a year, by rank amateurs who get paid to feature in fake “competitions”, like extras are paid to appear on a film set. Children as young as 14 have also been involved. “Short football”, a variation on futsal, is the most popular of the sports offered on 1xBet online platforms. Others are far more arcane, even absurd-looking. “Subsoccer”, also known as “bench soccer”, for example, pitches two players kicking a ball in a minuscule meshed enclosure.

A 2 v. 2 “short football” game streamed and offered by 1XBet on their Georgian website.

A game of “bench soccer”, live streamed by 1XBet.

Feed the frenzy
Why go to such lengths, when offering odds on the myriad “normal” sports competitions taking place every day is enough for 1XBet’s competitors? The answer is obvious: money. Key to 1xBet’s profitability is to offer an ever-greater number of events to bet on in order to feed the insatiable appetite of the most avid punters, the ones who generate the most revenue and for whom a ‘traditional’ offer is not enough. 

According to web traffic analysis tool SimilarWeb, 1xbet[.]com was visited 15 million times by unique users between July and September 2024. Most of these visitors hailed from Brazil. The actual, global figures, which can only be estimated, would dwarf that number, as 1xBet operates numerous mirror websites at national and international level and uses alternative URLs which escape detection. The Ghanaian and Argentinian versions of 1xbet[.]com attracted 7 million and 9.2 million visits respectively during the same period, for example. In any case, most of their customers use dedicated apps to place their bets, especially in Africa, where 1XBet has now established itself as the continent’s number one operator. This huge demand is why the bookmaker organises its own 24/7 tournaments in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, in venues and locations our partners Bellingcat were able to identify.

 1,297 matches in 24 hours
“Short football” games pitch teams of two to five players per side and last ten to twelve minutes, after which the same players change jerseys and start another game in one of the adjoining pitches, which are separated from each other by curtains. “Arsenal” will now be “Amsterdam” or “Dortmund”. What matters is that the action is non-stop, that there always is a game to place a bet on, day and night.

Same players, different jerseys.

Those games are offered in vertigo-inducing numbers. Our partner Bellingcat identified a total of 1,297 ‘short football’ matches live-streamed by 1XBet over a period of twenty-four hours in September 2024 (*). Should this frequency be maintained over a calendar year – and there is no reason why it should be any different – it can be deduced that, come 31 December 2024, the bookmaker will have offered odds on close to 500,000 of those games in twelve months, to which must be added thousands more involving other sports, as it’s not just ‘short football’ which 1xBet live streams on its platforms. It is also 2 v. 2 cricket, 3 v. 3 ice hockey, table basketball, volleyball, tennis, table tennis – and “bench soccer”, of course (*). The quality of the games reflect the quality of the players involved – as well as the fact that they work in shifts of up to five hours, and that some players will go straight from one shift to the next.

In the GIF above, a 2 v. 2 “short football game” between “Mirabel” and “Mirador”. Below, a GIF from a “game” between “Tottenham” and “Zenit”.

Not all 1xBet customers can access those streams and place bets on those games. From Georgia, Kenya, the Philippines, Hong Kong, India – even Norway, where 1XBet is unlicensed – no problem. Those games appear in 1xbet[.]com’s “live football” section. But punters based in Spain will not even be aware that those “competitions” exist, for example. This is understandable, as Spain is the only country in Western Europe in which the Russian-Cypriot company has been able to acquire a bona fide licence through its Valencia-based affiliate Wagerfair SA. The Spanish regulator, the Dirección General de Ordenación del Juego, prohibits offering odds on sports events which involve minors or are susceptible to being manipulated. 1xBet would have a lot of explaining to do if their Spanish customers could place wagers on the kind of games this investigation is highlighting, all the more so since Spain has just ratified the Macolin Convention on sports manipulation (*).

The same is not true of Morocco, where 1xBet not only does not have a licence, but is the subject of a criminal complaint filed by the country’s authorities. This does not prevent the operator from running a dedicated platform specifically targeting this country – and proposing bets on its “short football” competitions, as seen below.

“Belarus” v. “Georgia” in 3 v. 3 “short football”, accessed on 1xBet Morocco on 15 October 2024.

More surprisingly, as 1xBet was recently granted a temporary licence there, it is possible to watch and bet on the competitions in question in Brazil, even if they represent an infringement of the local regulator’s rules. This licence will come up for review in December. One of the games we followed, “Master” vs. “Junior”, featured players who appeared very young indeed, though it was not possible to verify their age in this instance.

A “short football” 3 v. 3 game offered on 1xBet’s Brazilian platform.

Russia, Belarus…Ukraine?
These games take place in a variety of venues, which has been possible to locate by analysing hundreds of videos streamed by 1xbet[.]com, using reverse image searches, internet posts by participants and ‘teams’ involved in those games and other OSINT tools. These venues include the Alexander Stepin football school in Bryansk, the southern Russian city where Semiokhin, Ragozin and Karshkov used to run their very first venture, the ‘Bookmaker Pub’. This football school has links to president Putin’s party United Russia as well as to sanctioned gas giant Gazprom.

Children preparing for practice and posing with rifles at the Alexander Stepin football school in Bryansk.

The same pitch, used by ‘Shanghai’ and ‘Tokyo’ in a 1xBet stream of ‘short football’.

Other venues used to stage the games include the Universal Sports Complex in Severodvinsk, where a floorball game – a genuine match, this time, organised by the National Floorball Federation of Russia – involving local teams Typhoon and SPB United was streamed and offered to gamblers on 1xBet. It was possible to identify some of the girls taking part in that game. The youngest were 14, the average age of the Typhoon players being just under 16, a violation of the regulations which prevent bookmakers from offering odds on sports encounters involving minors of that age (*).

Profiles of Typhoon players taken from Russia’s National Floorball Federation, showing the years of birth of some of the players

Another Russian arena is the Mordovia Sports Complex in Saransk, which hosts 5-a-side games of the ‘Students League’ (streamed live on 1xBet), but also weapon-training classes. Two venues in Belarus were also identified, in Minsk and Mogilev.

Whilst it is surprising that 1xBet should be able to stage games in Belarus, where they suspended their operations in March 2022 and in Russia, a country where their founders are subject to arrest warrants, it is even harder to explain how sports events taking place in the Ukrainian capital could end up being streamed by the sanctioned bookmaker. 1xBet was banned in Ukraine in the wake of the February 2022 Russian invasion, as an organisation allegedly supporting Vladimir Putin’s war machine.

Yet this has happened, with at least one basketball game played at Kyiv’s Svoi Arna being broadcast live on 1xBet. After the war broke out, 1xBet has streamed thousands of table tennis games played in Ukraine.

A basketball match played at the Svoi Arena, Kyiv, as streamed on 1xBet.

So much for the venues; but what about the players? This is when what is already a very strange story becomes even stranger.

Polygraph tests – and five goals maximum!
Josimar tracked down Dimitri (*), one of the hundreds if not thousands of players who have featured in 1xBet’s “short football” tournaments. He was recruited through his amateur club in Russia and warned by his chairman that fixing a game he was involved in or betting on it himself was strictly off-limits. He was also told that he would have to undergo a polygraph test from time to time to prove he’d played by the book. “The organisers take one or two players from each team for a lie detector test,” Dimitri told Josimar. “It would be for like 10 or 15 minutes. The questions were like, ‘Have you contacted somebody? Have you told somebody to bet on you? Have you told somebody you are playing this tournament?” We all knew that somebody would go on a lie detector before we started playing. The coordinator told us ‘it’s because it’s for betting’. If they found out that you’re lying there was a big financial penalty and then you and the whole team got banned from the competition”. This account is backed by promotional material published by Bigsports, a Russian company which supplies footage (and even live commentary in some cases) of “amateur” games to online bookmakers such as 1xBet. One of these fake competitions is a version of the Bundesliga, the German league, renamed “Bundnesliga”.

Screenshot of a Bigsports YouTube video 

Bisgports’s Russian website advertising 1xBet’s “short  football” games, including a “Budnesliga” 5×5 match, 18 October 2024. Note the use of the trademarked crests and logos. 

Bigsports and 1xBet covering the same “Budnesliga” 5 v. 5 game in sync, 18 October 2024.

Dimitri played 5 v. 5 games in 1xBet’s “BudnesLiga” (sic) league for about a week before realising it was “so sketchy” that “you don’t want to be part of that”, adding that “some games are fixed, I’m totally sure of that”. The games, he says, “were played on the same pitches that the amateur [league clubs] were playing on at the weekend”.

While his team was not directed to win or lose a game, players were instructed not to score more than five goals in matches. “We knew that if you score five goals you don’t score anymore. Five goals was the maximum and if you scored more, you would get less money (Dimitri was paid 2,000 rubles in cash a day, about 30 US dollars at the time). It was the rule. So we always did maximum five goals. I think they were doing it for the purposes of under-betting. I heard that one tournament at that time was generating about 1 million rubles for 1xBet (15,000 dollars) .”

A “Budnesliga” (sic) 5×5 game between “Alemania” and “Bochum”, accessed from Kenya on 16 October 2024

He worked the 09:00 to 14:00 shift himself, but the games were scheduled round the clock, every day of the week. “When you come to the facility, there are changing rooms. You have to leave your phones for the whole tournament, so you don’t give away some information to your friends and so on. You play like six or seven games in a day. You finish and then another bunch of people come and there is the next tournament. There are constant tournaments, even at midnight. They do it 24/7″. And while he quickly quit, as did most of the other young footballers involved he knew, he is aware of one person who played for a couple of years. “It was like a full time job for him. He played day and night”. According to Dimitri, this particular player made more money in a year playing fake tournaments than an average doctor would in Russia.

Awards and more awards
The constant stream of controversies which have engulfed 1xBet over the years and led them to losing their UK licence in 2019, does not seem to have affected their status within the industry yet. 2024 has been another bumper year so far for them in this regard. They have expanded in new territories such as Brazil, hired new ambassadors and collected more distinctions than any of their global competitors. Despite operating illegally (*) in most of the 191 countries it claims to be active in and despite organising approximately 500 000 games in fake tournaments, 1xBet was recently shortlisted in no fewer than seven categories for the EGR Operator Awards 2024, whose winners will be announced in London later this week. This year alone, they have already been voted “Best Sportsbook Operator of the Year” at the SiGMA Africa Awards 2024, “Affiliate Company of the Year” at the International Gaming Awards 2024, and “Best Esports Operator 2024 in Latin America” at the SiGMA Americas Awards 2024. 

1xBet has also recently renewed its partnership with FC Barcelona, which will now run until June 2029, signed up the model and influencer Urvashi Rautela – 72 million followers on Instagram alone – as a brand ambassador in India, a country where the bookmaker cannot operate legally but is one of its key markets nonetheless, and was the main sponsor of the SBC Summit in Lisbon last month, despite being unlicensed in Portugal, parading its global partnerships with Barcelona, Lille Olympique, Paris Saint-Germain, CAF and Serie A on the biggest stand at the event.

1xBet’s stand at the SBC Summit, Lisbon, 24-26 September 2024.

Josimar approached Corentin Segalen, the President of the Group of Copenhagen, the international network of platforms fighting against the manipulation of sports competitions, who made the following comments.

“Constitutes manipulation” 
“A ‘ghost game’ can take two [main] forms. It can be a game organised with fake teams in order to fool the bettors, or even decide how a game will unfold; or it is a game that doesn’t even take place, with criminals publishing false live in-play data. This is why gaming regulators such as ANJ in France publish lists of competitions which can be offered to bet on. In regard to your investigation, we are leaning more towards the first case scenario, with the illegal use of false team names from famous clubs, involving amateur players”.

“When it comes to players being forbidden to score more than a certain number of points, this completely fits in in the definition of a “fixed game” as it appears in Article 3 of the Macolin Convention: “an intentional arrangement, act or omission aimed at an improper alteration of the result or the course of a sports competition in order to remove all or part of the unpredictable nature of the aforementioned sports competition with a view to obtaining an undue advantage for oneself or for others“. This arrangement guarantees that all the bets placed on the “over” market will lose. This constitutes manipulation”. 

1xBet was contacted through multiple channels on multiple occasions but did not reply to detailed questions. FC Barcelona declined to comment. PSG did not respond. Bigsports, the Alexander Stepin school, the Mordovia Sports Complex and the National Floorball Federation of Russia were all contacted but did not reply to enquiries. 

(*) Karshkov is said to have died from anaphylactic shock during a medical procedure in June 2023.

(*) Josimar accessed the Norwegian mirror version of 1xbet[.]com on 15 and 16 October 2024 at various times of the day. The website offered between 18 and 22 different  live “short football” games at any given time, which, given the duration of these games (about 10-12 minutes) , is consistent with the figures provided by Bellingcat.

(*) The equipment used in 1xBet games purports to be manufactured by a Finnish company called Subsoccer, which when shown images of the 1xBet streams, told Bellingcat: “The content you sent is not related to us in any way. We have not granted any rights to them regarding our products, trademarks, or other brand elements. The games shown in the images are illegal copies of our patented product and infringe on the patent granted to us.”

(*) (*) 1xBet’s licence in Kenya was suspended after they were found to have offered odds on U16 basketball games on their local website.

(*) Josimar was able to access 1xBet’s fake games in Spain by using an alternative URL, however.

(*) Dimitri’s real name has been withheld at his request. 

(*) Josimar uses the definition of “illegal sports betting” agreed on by the 41 signatories of the Macolin Convention, which include Norway and the United Kingdom: “Any sports betting activity whose type or operator is not allowed under the applicable law of the jurisdiction where the consumer is located”.