One day in June 2022, a few dozen residents of Molipur — a village in the Indian state of Gujarat — gathered on the edge of a field to watch a game of cricket. The sport is one of India’s most popular pastimes, played by people of all ages, on streets and pavements, in walled compounds and on rooftop terraces, inside urban parks and on dusty, rural grounds. Cricket is so ubiquitous in India that the game in Molipur might have drawn no attention from the villagers, but for its relative sophistication compared with village cricket, which is typically played with a tennis ball and a bat and a little pile of rocks that serves as the wicket, in lieu of stumps. By contrast, this game looked professional: the batsmen wore pads and gloves, the players had team jerseys on and they were playing with a hard, leather ball. There were even two umpires on the field, dressed in white coats. And just like in real cricket games on TV, the umpires had walkie-talkies to communicate with each other.

The game was the opener for a league that was being organised by a village resident named Shoyeb Davda, a chubby man in his mid-thirties, with a wispy beard and thick glasses. The field the players were playing on was a patch of farmland that Davda had leased from a neighbour. In the weeks prior, he had cleared the land of shrubs, levelled it with a tractor, then used a roller to flatten a long strip in the middle. On it, he laid down a cricketing mat that would allow the ball to bounce evenly.

Some of the games were to be played in the evening, so Davda had halogen lights installed around the field. Perhaps most striking was the fact that Davda arranged to livestream the games on YouTube, for which he had a metal tower built that provided a perch for a videographer to operate a camera. A few dozen yards from it, he had a small room constructed with sheets of corrugated metal — a basic version of a broadcast studio, equipped with a computer, a couple of LED monitors and other electronics needed for livestreaming.

These arrangements might have suggested that the league featured professional-grade cricket that an online audience would find worth watching, but in fact, the players weren’t established cricketers or even skilled amateurs. They were locals that Davda had recruited with the promise of paying 400 rupees (about £3.50) per day — nearly twice what people in the area make in daily wages working on farms and for local businesses. For those who signed up, the opportunity to play the sport with proper gear and a real cricket ball was an added incentive. Seeing a camera filming the games made the enterprise even more attractive. “It felt great to know that I was going to be on TV,” Sukhaji Thakor, one of the players, told me.

There was a catch, though, the players soon learned. They were required to follow the umpire’s directions when playing. Dhaval, a 22-year-old player, told me the umpire would call out instructions to the batsman and the bowler about what he wanted. “While batting, I would be told if I needed to score a four or hit a six or had to get out,” Dhaval said. It wasn’t always feasible to do what the umpire asked, but Dhaval explained that he did not actually have to score the desired hits. If asked for a “four”, he just had to try to strike the ball with the centre of his bat so the ball would travel far enough to exit the camera frame. The umpire would signal “four” even if the ball didn’t make it to the boundary. “When the umpire asked me to get out, I would hit the ball in the air so it could look like I got caught out, or I would miss and let the ball hit the stumps,” Dhaval said. Like the other players, he was curious about why the games were directed this way but didn’t want to risk the job by probing too much. “We were just interested in the money,” he told me.

The games went on for several days before an informant for the local police became intrigued by what was going on. He found it odd that novice players had been offered money, and even stranger that such amateurish games were being broadcast over the internet. Watching from the sidelines, he noticed that none of the players were allowed into the cabin on the edge of the field, where Davda sat with an associate, and communicated with the umpires by walkie-talkie.

On the afternoon of 7 July, a team of policemen showed up at the ground and stopped the game. Two of the cops barged into the cabin and nabbed Davda and his associate, a young man named Mohammad Saqib. When they checked the men’s phones, they discovered that the two had been messaging over Telegram with a handful of individuals in Russia, receiving instructions on how to direct the play on the field. The games were being staged as part of an innovative gambling racket in which online viewers could place bets on outcomes. What the police had stumbled upon was a bizarre scheme exemplifying the increasing sophistication and creativity of deceptions in a modern era of crimes enabled by the internet and a globalised economy.

In the shadows of India’s multi-billion-dollar cricket industry thrives a related enterprise: betting on cricket. It must stay hidden, because most forms of gambling are illegal in the country. Traditionally, gamblers in India have placed bets on cricket outcomes in person or by phone with local bookmakers. “The bookie writes it down — that’s your bet,” Jay Sayta, a Mumbai-based lawyer who advises gaming companies, told me. “And then you settle with him in cash every week or every month or whatever.”

Starting about six years ago, sports betting in India became a lot easier. One enabling factor was easy access to dozens of online betting sites, like 1xbet and Parimatch, which are headquartered overseas and heavily promoted in India. “Everyone had a phone, everyone had 4G and high-speed internet, cheap data plans, all of that,” Sayta said. Another, perhaps more important, factor was the advent of India’s Unified Payments Interface, an online platform that made it easy to make and receive payments by phone, leading to an explosion in digital payments since 2016. “There was no need for a credit card or a debit card,” Sayta said.

International betting sites saw an opportunity to tap into what had always been a large market controlled by bookies on the ground. The sites felt emboldened because online gambling wasn’t specifically covered by India’s archaic anti-gambling laws, which date to 1857. “They started openly advertising on TV and in newspapers everywhere,” Sayta said. Although Indian authorities occasionally stepped in to close certain sites, the companies running them found workarounds. “They would set up a mirror site,” Sayta said. “So, if the government blocked 1xbet.com, they would open 2xbet.com.”

South African former cricket player Hansie Cronje

Beyond its illegality, gambling on cricket has been stigmatised by a series of match-fixing scandals. In 2000, the South Africa team was touring India when the Delhi police tapped a phone conversation between an Indian bookmaker and the South African captain, Hansie Cronje. In a subsequent inquiry, Cronje admitted to accepting money from bookies and offering to pay his teammates to underperform. (Cronje would end up banned from cricket for life. He died in a plane crash in 2002.) A few months later, India’s Central Bureau of Investigation issued a report accusing several cricket stars of match-fixing, including the former India captain Mohammad Azharuddin; he and other cricketers were banned from the sport (although that ban was later overturned). In 2013, the Delhi police arrested three players from an Indian Premier League team on charges of spot-fixing, the act of rigging a specific, in-game action on which a bet can be placed — for example, the possibility that the bowler will pitch a “no ball”.

While betting scandals in international cricket and the Indian Premier League have made headlines, the corruption at lower levels of the sport has received less attention. “What all goes on in the name of cricket in this country will blow your mind,” said Niraj Kumar, the former commissioner of the Delhi Police. A genial man whose soft-spoken manner is at times laced with mellow sarcasm, Kumar supervised investigations into cricket betting before he retired from the police in 2013; later, from 2015 to 2018, he served as head of the Anti-Corruption unit of the Board of Control of Cricket in India (BCCI), the nation’s top governing body for the sport. He described to me fake talent hunts organised by con men looking to exploit the dreams of aspiring cricketers.

During his stint at the BCCI, Kumar told me, he learnt there were small leagues being organised primarily with the purpose of rigging matches to profit from betting. He helped the police disrupt one such tournament in Jaipur in 2017. Kumar was certain it wouldn’t be the last one he would hear about.

One afternoon in May 2023, I drove from the police headquarters in Gujarat’s Mehsana district to the village of Molipur with Dharamsinh Desai and Sanjay Chauhan, two constables who were on the team that shut down the sham league in 2022. We got off the highway and entered Molipur, which, like many Indian villages, is in the process of transforming into a small town. We drove through the commercial centre, and wound our way past clusters of brick houses until we were riding along a narrow dirt road in the middle of farmland. Desai asked the driver to stop by a field hemmed by shrubs and trees: the tournament venue.

We walked along the perimeter of the field. Desai showed me where the tall poles with halogen lights had stood. “And that’s where the cabin was, with the computer and the other equipment,” he said, pointing to a location close to where we had parked the car, adjacent to a well. A neck-high sorghum was growing on a portion of the field. I saw the other constable, Chauhan, throw a rock up into the foliage of a mango tree. A cluster of green mangoes came tumbling down. Laughing, he gathered them up and put them into the trunk of our car.

The raid at this ground in July 2022 made headlines in India and other cricketing nations, giving Molipur an infamy the village had never seen before. “The police rarely came here. It was always a peaceful place with hardly any crime,” Chauhan told me.

When the Mehsana police interviewed Davda, it quickly became clear that even though he was the one who did all the legwork to set up the league, he was taking orders from a group of individuals in Russia. A school dropout from a farming family, Davda had gone to Russia in 2021 looking for employment. Soon after he got to Moscow, he began working at a toy store. There, he was approached by a Pakistani expatriate named Asif, who offered him a job playing cricket in Russia. “That sounded better than packing and unpacking boxes,” Davda told me.

He spent the next few weeks with other South Asian immigrants playing cricket in an indoor space that he told me doubled as the men’s living quarters. When his visa ran out, he returned to Molipur. A few months later — Davda told me — Asif called him, to ask if he could organise a local league in his village that could be livestreamed on the internet.

Asif was one of the individuals in the Telegram messaging group that investigators found on Davda’s phone. This is where Davda and his associate, Saqib, were being given instructions on how to manipulate the games. Investigators suspected these individuals were the key conspirators. One went by the name Misha. There was a second Pakistani named Majid. And then there was Ashok Chowdhury, an Indian expat, originally from Meerut in the state of Uttar Pradesh.

The games in Molipur weren’t the only ones being directed from Russia. Just days after the bust in Molipur, the police in another part of India — in another small town in the same state, Uttar Pradesh — learned of a league being live-streamed from a local cricket ground that seemed dubious. Dharmendra, who works in the surveillance unit of the Hapur police, told me a friend who had been watching the game tipped him off. The friend thought it was strange that the live scores of the game, which were being posted to an online platform called CricHeroes, didn’t reflect what was happening on the ground.

The police raided the venue. Seeing the cops, a young man who was doing the live-streaming and the scoring got up and started running. He managed to hitch a ride with someone on the highway, but was apprehended before he could get very far.

His name was Rishabh Jain. At first, he was belligerent with the cops, claiming he was a professional cricketer. His tone mellowed when the police started asking questions. Investigating further, the police discovered that the game Jain was livestreaming was listed on 1xbet.com for placing bets — evidence that the rigging was aimed at defrauding gamblers.

Like Davda, Jain had spent a couple of months in Russia in 2021. While playing cricket there for a local club, he became acquainted with Chowdhury, who was captain of a different club team. After he returned to India, Jain told the cops, Chowdhury offered him money to organise cricket games and livestream them from a cricket academy in Meerut.

Jain had a connection to the league in Gujarat, too. He had trained Saqib and was in regular contact with him when Saqib and Davda were livestreaming the Molipur games, the Gujarat investigators told me. “He would message Jain for help any time there was a technical problem,” Desai said. That’s why the Gujarat police wanted to question him. Days after Jain was released on bail from Hapur, Desai and his colleagues traveled to Jain’s hometown of Gwalior with a warrant for his arrest.

Jain’s father, a textile merchant named Dhanesh, did all he could to try to stop them, Desai told me. He asked local politicians to intervene, insisting that his son was being framed. “The head of the textile-traders’ association called to ask why we couldn’t question Jain in Gwalior itself,” Desai told me. Such pressures are routine during police work in India.

The conversations took place at the Gwalior crime branch-office: Jain, stood there abashedly, while his father argued with the police, demanding to see evidence of Jain’s involvement in the crime. Desai had an idea. He got Jain to write an application to his bank asking for his bank-account statements for the past two years. The bank happened to be next door. “The bank manager immediately printed out the statements and gave it to me,” Desai said. Returning to the branch office, he began going through the statements. Within half an hour, he had highlighted some 45 different money transfers that Ashok Chowdhury had made into Jain’s account, amounting to about £3,000. Visibly anxious and confused, Dhanesh confronted his son. “Why did he transfer this money to you?” he asked.

Jain didn’t have an answer. His father backed off. That evening, the investigators arrested Jain and they all boarded a train for Gujarat. Jain was in tears. “My cricket career will be ruined,” he said. Desai and his colleagues offered to get him dinner. “We’ll buy you pizza, anything you’d like,” Desai told him, joking that the police wouldn’t bill his father for it. But Jain had lost all appetite. He asked for a soft drink instead.

Questioned by investigators after they reached Gujarat, Jain said Chowdhury first hired him in late 2021 and sent him to work at a cricket academy in Meerut. At Chowdhury’s behest, he began organising rigged games there, and that’s where he trained Saqib to livestream the games. Jain told investigators that he initially objected to the scheme but decided to go along, following a reprimand from Chowdhury, because he needed the money. At some point, the academy’s owners realised what Jain was up to and disallowed the use of their grounds, forcing him to shift to the venue in Hapur, where he got caught.

Hoping to get more context on the Russian connection to the story, I approached Ashwani Chopra, president of Cricket Russia, the sport’s governing board in the country, and founder of the Russian Cricket Federation. Chopra migrated from India in the 1990s and owns a chain of Indian restaurants in Moscow. Although Chopra has personally invested considerable effort over the years to make cricket popular in Russia — organising leagues, assembling a Russian national team, of which he was once the captain — he admitted that the sport never caught on among native Russians.

Several months before the bogus leagues were discovered in Molipur and Hapur, Chopra had learned of similarly dodgy games being played in Russia, he told me. Sometime in 2021, he overheard a young Indian man who had come to one of Chopra’s restaurants talking to his friends about cricket. When Chopra joined in the conversation, he learned that the person was being paid to play in games that were being live-streamed. Chopra had never heard of cricket players in Russia making money from playing the sport, so he made some inquiries. “These games were being played inside basketball courts and broadcast on the internet,” he told me. “The audience was in India and Pakistan and Bangladesh, placing bets from there.” Chopra told me he helped to shut down two questionable leagues that he became aware of — one in the city of Yekaterinburg, 900 miles south-east of Moscow, and another in Yaroslavl, a city 160 miles north-east of the capital.

The more I spoke to Chopra and to Kumar, the ex-commissioner of the Delhi police, about
the faux league of Molipur, the clearer it became to me why a bizarre scheme to defraud gamblers might have seemed lucrative. Organising sham games played by amateurs on a village farm was inexpensive. It didn’t take much expertise to stream those games live on YouTube for viewers who were addicted to betting. The revenue from rigging what might have been a large volume of bets — investigators don’t know the numbers — could be huge. Since sports betting in India is illegal, there was little chance that victims of the fraud — the gamblers being duped — would complain to law enforcement. Moreover, if the masterminds could orchestrate it all from overseas, the risk of getting caught was justifiably minimal. The internet made it all possible.

In the weeks before my visit to India in May, I made repeat calls to a Russian phone number I had for Ashok Chowdhury. There was no answer, which didn’t surprise me. All the coverage of the Molipur and the Uttar Pradesh raids had named Chowdhury as one of the alleged masterminds that the Indian police wanted to get hold of, so I assumed he was lying low in Moscow and wasn’t eager to be found.

During my trip to India, however, when I travelled to Meerut, I was surprised to learn that Chowdhury has been seen in a car at a traffic light in the city a couple of days earlier. I wasted no time in driving to Chowdhury’s address, located in a beautiful, tree-lined neighbourhood of Meerut. It is a large, three-storied house; a thick steel gate emitted a metallic groan when I turned the latch and entered the compound. A little girl came to the door when I knocked. She called out to her grandfather, who came over to ask for my name. “Yes, Ashok is here,” he said, and asked me to wait.

I stood there, unsure if Chowdhury would be willing to meet. He came out a few minutes later and greeted me jovially, as if I was an old friend. Shaking my hand, he commented on how cool the weather was for May. We sat down on two plastic chairs. I’d only given my name earlier, so I began to introduce myself more fully, but he cut me off. “We’re already acquainted!” he said, smiling. He had looked me up on the internet, he said. I recalled I had messaged a relative of his a few months earlier.

Chowdhury has a puffy face and a prominent chin, and narrow eyes that become slits when he laughs “You know why I’m pleased to meet you? Because I’ve finally found someone who has even less hair than me,” he said, letting out a big chuckle. I laughed, remarking on his noticeably bigger midriff. He insisted this wasn’t true, asking me to stand up to enable a fair, visual comparison. He conceded the point.

Despite moving to Russia in the late 1980s, Chowdhury holds an Indian passport and maintains his strong ties to India, in part for business reasons. In his early years in Moscow, he sold leather jackets imported from Meerut. He now sells rice and Ayurvedic products sourced from India. When Chowdhury landed in Delhi in November 2022, airport authorities informed the Gujarat police, which had issued a lookout notice for him. He was arrested and taken to Mehsana, where he spent three days in jail before being granted bail. After the frenzied coverage following the raid in Molipur, it was surprising that the news of his arrest never became public.

Chowdhury told me he was baffled by the case. He became involved, he said, because an Indian trader he had known for years in Russia asked for his help in organising a cricket tournament in India. “He told me we would make money from views and likes on YouTube,” Chowdhury said. He added he was clueless about the betting side of it. “I have never gambled! I don’t know how cricket betting works! And I’m supposed to be the kingpin?” He also blamed Jain, who he said called him days after the raid in Uttar Pradesh to apologise for naming him to the police.

I asked him how someone who had been a businessman for three decades could have bought into a proposal promising income from YouTube streaming of cricket played by locals. “Why should I have bothered about how this business was going to work?” he said. “I was told I would get paid per game, and that’s all I cared about.”

Why had he then agreed to invest his own money, helping Jain to buy the equipment needed to broadcast the games? Chowdhury evaded the question. Later, he agreed the games in Molipur appeared to have been fixed, but he denied having anything to do with that tournament, even though the Gujarat police found him exchanging messages in the Telegram group that was implicated in that case. Maybe someone had used him, he said. I remarked that he didn’t seem like someone who could be bamboozled easily. “Oh, you’re so wrong,” he said, his smile fading for a second, as though he felt genuinely hurt.

I recently asked one of the investigators how realistic it was to expect this unusual case to reach trial. The likelihood is low, he admitted, not least because of the backlog of far more pressing cases in the Indian courts. But some of the accused — like Majid, Asif and the mysterious Misha — were unlikely to be brought to India. It seemed that the masterminds behind the fraud had got away with their calculated bet.