Baseball and basketball officials on Tuesday were scrambling to find evidence of match-fixing attempts in their professional leagues, following recent testimony by a gambling broker, who has been arrested for an alleged connection with volleyball match fixing, that other leagues also had match-rigging issues.
Prosecutors in Daegu, who are investigating a snowballing match-fixing scandal in the top pro volleyball circuit called V-League, have expanded their probe into baseball and basketball.
According to prosecutors, the arrested broker, surnamed Kim, said on Monday he heard about match-fixing schemes in the Korea Baseball Organization (KBO) and the Korean Basketball League (KBL) games, from another broker surnamed Kang.
Kim has already been indicted for his role in football match fixing last year and received a four-year sentence in his first trial, prosecutors said. The broker named KBO ball clubs and active pitchers in his testimony, they added.
Baseball, basketball, football and volleyball are the country’s four major professional sports. Football’s K-League was rocked by its first match-fixing controversy last year, with dozens of active and former players indicted or found guilty. The V-League’s first scandal emerged earlier this month and four active players have received lifetime bans from the sport for their alleged roles.
The KBO and the KBL, which have never dealt with match-fixing allegations, reacted with surprise on Tuesday.
“We will check with individual clubs to see how, if any, match fixing has taken place,” a KBO official said. “But unless players report themselves, it will be difficult to find out just what has gone on.”
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1. depletion Posted: February 14, 2012 at 09:58 AM (#4060451)They have fixed snowball fights in Korea? Some people will bet on anything.
that narrows it down quite a bit.
Don't blame me. I voted for Kodos.
I've recently become a very casual fan of cricket, and it seems like this stuff happens all the time in that sport as well. I guess the solution is probably to pay the players enough that this sort of thing isn't worth their while, and if that money doesn't exist, to drop the lifetime ban hammer. There's not a ton of downside to match fixing if you can double your salary, maybe have a 20% chance of getting caught, and only have to sit out a year or two if you do get caught.
I see the volleyball league in Korea banned players for life, as did the K-League. A good start.
People bet on volleyball?!?!? Now that's some degenerate gambling there.
In Korea, newspapers can't give out full names of criminals until they are convicted. They always just use the family name.
The players really are paid a pittance. Korea is a rich country, the salaries they make really aren't enough to support themselves on, especially the non-baseball sports. If they want to be treated as serious sports leagues, SK, LG, Kia, and the rest of the team owners need to act like it and pay their talent.
Given that they were paid £65,000, £10,000 and £2,500 respectively this is not what you'd call a winning proposition (even the guy who's seemingly ahead of the game has legal fees to consider)
The guy with the heaviest penalties was the captain of the team and another was the second ranked bowler in the world at the time. The money they were paid rates to be pocket change for them. It's just that I'm pretty sure they were safe. They weren't throwing games. It wasn't even point shaving. They simply agreed to throw a "no-ball" (certain type of illegal deliveries that are penalized by a run. Conceptually similar to a balk) at a specific time. The gamblers were making proposition bets.
What led to the conviction wasn't sharp police work or an investigation by the governing body, but rather a News of the World reporter who paid £150,000 for details of the precise timing of three no-balls. (News of the World isn't getting its money back. The judge said, "I consider that the NOTW got what it bargained for.")
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