The Fake Indian Cricket League Created for Real Online Betting

The sun was still rising one peaceful morning in late June 2022 when Constable Abdulgfar Saiyedali received an unusual telephone call from a friend. He was at police headquarters in Mehsana, a city of about 215,000 in the western Indian state of Gujarat, where he works as an officer in the Special Operations Group, a national unit that mainly covers narcotics, weapons and counterterrorism.

The friend had a tip for Saiyedali. A perplexing cricket tournament was taking place in Molipur, a farming village about 30 miles away that’s populated largely by Sunni Muslims. The matches looked rudimentary, played by local amateurs on dried-out farmland, yet they were being recorded as though for broadcast, and the umpire was either manipulating the rules or didn’t know them at all.