11 Pro Players Charged In Esport Scandal

20 May 2010 at 12:25:34 by Gunnar Petzall

Names of players being revealed to the public in e-Sport's biggest scandal, a follow up from our previous report.

In total, 16 people have been implicated in the match fixing scandal. 11 of these are current and former progamers of StarCraft, and their names are now being revealed.

Korean laws protects the privacy of those involved, but a few details including last names are revealed and some players are easy to spot. Other players have openly admitted their crimes and ask their fans for forgiveness.

This comes as massive shocks to many fans, who long thought this implication of their favourite players would be false or in error. The image associated with this news item is a fan reaction to the situation, showing the player named Saviour as the Lich King.

Three brokers were indicted, gaming academy owner Mr Park, K3 (3rd division) soccer pro Mr Jung, and the gangster Mr Kim, who is currently wanted.

Mr Ma, which fans generally believe is the famous player known as Saviour, helped the brokers to offer the deals to intentionally lose matches to other players, paying between 2 million to 6.6 million South Korean won (£1200 GBP - £3900 GBP) each. Twelve games are alleged to have been tampered with in this manner. Out of the seven currently processed progamers, six of them have been paid this amount for matches they have forfeited.

Park and Kim has supposedly earned a total of 140 million won (£8340 GBP) in bet winnings from e-Sport betting sites, and Jung a total of 12 million won (£7150 GBP) in bet earnings.

It was also revealed that Mr Ma pocketed 2 million won (£1200 GBP), that was meant to pay the progamers involved in the match-fixing bets.

They will all face further investigation without facing arrest at the moment.

Coaches, the teams as a whole and managers were found to be not involved at all, after further investigation.

Known mostly by their screen names, YellOw[ArnC], Luxury, Yarnc, UpMaGiC, go.go, and type-b have all admitted their crimes and apologised to fans. With the few details released about players, the following are essentially confirmed by name deduction: sAviOr (the main contact for gamers), Justin, Hwasin or Movie (Hwasin more likely) and DarkElf.

On top of these, netizens of South Korea also suspects Sangho, but Artosis, another prominent player, has stepped forward to confirm that he is not involved.

Further detail and speculation can be found at the e-Sport site TeamLiquid's reports.

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