14 DAY TRIAL // Ever since StarCraft became a sport, it's been plagued by the same problem, which is illegal bets, corruption, and pretty much anything associated with that. Guess what? A new wave of arrests have been made in South Korea on charges of match-fixing and illegal betting.
The largest scandal to affect this area of eSport was back in 2011, but it looks like the new one is going to be bigger than that. Some of you might wonder why there is a problem with these competitions, and you would probably be amazed to know just how much money is being made, especially in South Korea, where StarCraft II events are huge, televised, and sponsored. This means that players get paid to play, and the prizes are enormous. Where there is money, there is corruption.
As you can imagine, like in any sport, there are some really good teams and players, and the rest of the pack. When you add betting to this recipe, it's easy to see why some people would be tempted to take advantage of it all. After all, it's only a game, right?
12 people have been arrested in the StarCraft II scandal
Among all of these arrests, there are some important names, like the PRIME head coach Gerrard (Park Wae-Sik), and gamers (eathletes?) YoDa (Choi Byeong-Heon) and BBoongBBoong (Choi Jong-Hyuk). If you're watching the StarCraft II world, you heard of them.
According to a report on teamliquid.net, a website dedicated to everything eSports, "brokers and financial backers were also arrested, including former progamer and esports journalist Enough (Seong Jun-mo) who acted as a broker. The two financial backers - who paid brokers to attempt to fix matches - were gangsters with ties to organized crime. A total of five professional StarCraft 2 matches were found to have been fixed according to the investigation. Four were played by YoDa, and one was played by BBoongBBoong. The matches took place in GSL and Proleague matches between January and June of this year."
As you can imagine, YoDa and Gerrard were banned for life, but it's not clear what happened with BboongBBoong. The Korean e-Sports Association takes this matter very seriously because any corruption scandal will affect them tremendously, and it took them a long time to regain the trust they lost in 2011.