‘The cash came up to my torso’ – tales of a match-fixer

The hotel lift gently levelled out and a muffled ding sounded. The doors slid back.

What Moses Swaibu saw next has stayed with him ever since.

“We were going to the room at the end of the corridor,” he says.

“I just remember that colour red, it was a really royal type of colour.

“And the place smelled expensive, you took a breath in and it was like ‘damn this environment ain’t how outside is’. It felt like a film set.”

Swaibu, having drunk a whisky cocktail for courage in the bar, was at The May Fair hotel in central London, walking towards the biggest decision of his life.

As he strode down the corridor, Swaibu didn’t know exactly what was behind that final door.

But he knew enough. It would be a criminal, cash and a career that betrayed everything he had worked for.

Once he crossed that threshold, there would be no turning back.

But, by the time Swaibu reached the door, any doubts had long since gone.

“Going into that meeting, there was nothing that could have got in the way,” he tells Confessions of a Match Fixer, an eight-part podcast on BBC Sounds.

“I knew there may be 60 grand there and I was willing to take it by any means necessary.”

Swaibu knocked and entered.

Not all doors opened as easily for Swaibu.

Back in his youth, after his parents split up, Swaibu and his older brother were raised by their father in Croydon in south London.

It was a strict upbringing. Swaibu’s father insisted on respect, manners and hard work.

“I never really had the best relationship with my dad,” says Swaibu.

“My school would finish around three o’clock and he would tell me that if I wasn’t back home by 4:30, the door would be locked.

“That door didn’t open until 9am the next morning.”

Often Swaibu would miss the curfew.

He spent evenings playing football, before riding London’s night bus network, criss-crossing the city. He slept in stairwells. Or relied on neighbours to let him crash on their floor.

“One house I went into, I slept on a mattress and could see loads of needles on the floor,” he says.

“You have to remember I was 12 or 13, you don’t know what things like that are.”

Swaibu did know football though.

Battling his brother in small-sided games gave him a mentality beyond his years. Quiet and shy off the pitch, he relished a tackle on it.

Aged 16, he was plucked out of a trial game, and did well enough during pre-season training with Crystal Palace to earn a youth contract.

He joined a talented crop of prospects.

A few years below, John Bostock had clubs all around Europe plotting to sign him. Victor Moses, who would go on to play for Chelsea and Liverpool, was also in the system.

A couple of weeks after his 18th birthday, Swaibu was alongside both in a marquee on the Selhurst Park pitch. It was Palace’s annual awards evening and the whole club – first team, office staff, grounds staff and a select few die-hard fans – were there.

Swaibu was the only attendee to be called to the stage twice though, winning Young Player of the Year and Scholar of the Year.

“I remember the chairman at the time came up to my mum and said ‘we’ve really got big plans for Moses’,” says Swaibu.

He made his Selhurst Park debut for Palace’s first team three months later, coming off the bench in a pre-season friendly against Premier League Everton.

Mikel Arteta and Andy Johnson were among the opposition. There were 20,000 fans in the stands. Swaibu replaced future Portugal international Jose Fonte for the final 10 minutes.

“I remember thinking ‘this is the moment I have worked so hard for, so much has happened in my life, please God protect me in this game’,” he says.

It never got better than that though.

Managers changed and Swaibu’s stock dropped. New boss Neil Warnock thought Swaibu was lightweight and too easily dominated in the air.

After a loan spell at Weymouth, he was released by Palace in May 2008 – just a year on from his awards night success.

The May Fair hotel wasn’t the first time Swaibu had been approached by match-fixers.

Eighteen months before, in January 2011, he had sat at the back of the Lincoln team coach with a duffel bag containing £60,000-worth of euro notes.

It had been offered to Swaibu and three of his team-mates by “a guy who looked like something stereotypical from a film, a scary Russian bad guy”. It was theirs to keep if they could ensure Lincoln were 1-0 down against Northampton at half-time of their League Two match.

Unbeknown to the rest of the team, Swaibu and the other three brought the money into the changing room.

Ultimately, they didn’t fix the match, in fact most of the potential conspirators were on the bench for the game anyway.

They returned the money and stayed quiet.

By August 2012 though, Swaibu, now 23, had slipped further down football’s ladder. He was playing for Bromley in the National League South – the sixth tier of the English game. The profile was lower, but the pressure was personal. Swaibu’s girlfriend was pregnant.

“In my mind, the most important thing in my life was making sure that I could pay for everything that I was under pressure to provide,” he says.

“My daughter couldn’t come into the world while I am on the back foot.”

So when, during a post-training warm-down, a team-mate asked him if he wanted to come to a “meeting” the next day, Swaibu got on the front foot.

He agreed. He travelled into London. He strode down the hotel corridor. He crossed the threshold.

“I opened the door and this guy – the guvnor, the main guy – was like 5ft standing up,” remembers Swaibu.

“He sat down on the bed, turned his back to us, lit up a cigarette and started doing something on his laptop.

“I remember thinking ‘bro, you can’t smoke in this hotel’.

“He didn’t speak English so there was a translator – probably 20, slim, glasses. He offered us a drink and then he got straight to the point.”

The point was simple. Bromley had to lose the first half of their forthcoming match against Eastbourne 2-0. Do that, and the syndicate’s bets would have come in. And, in the second half, Swaibu and his four fellow fixers could play normally.

The bribe would be £100,000 to share.

“I knew my team-mates were hesitant, but, leading up into that game, I was like ‘I am doing it’,” says Swaibu.

And he did.

In front of 655 fans, Bromley conceded a penalty in the 40th minute of the first half – given away by a player who knew nothing of the fix – and, into stoppage time before the break, were penalised for a handball in the box.

Eastbourne converted both spot-kicks and Swaibu had cashed in.

“We went into the dressing room at half-time and the gaffer says, ‘what the hell is going on?’,” he says.

“I went on my phone and there was just a thumbs up emoji from the translator.

“I thought this is just way too good to be true.”

Swaibu had fallen down the football pyramid, but he was soon climbing the criminal ranks.

As well as organising fixes at Bromley, he identified players who might be able to do the same elsewhere.

“I would find out who the most influential player is, who is captain, who is vice captain, who has been there for more than two years, who is on a second or third stint at the club, how many games have they played in the last two years,” he says.

Swaibu was a middleman, liaising between the fixers and a pool of around 50 players, organising meetings and distributing cash.

“I would go to established businesses – say a restaurant – open up a locked door that would look like a toilet or a store cupboard and find piles of money stacked up,” he says.

“It would be a lot. It was piled up to my torso and I am 6ft 3in. I would bundle it up in rubber bands and seal it with cling film.

“I would be carrying a big bag – like I was going to the gym – but, it was a towel over the top and then just cash underneath.

“One night, I brought home £500,000.

“It made me so paranoid. I didn’t wear anything flashy, I rarely drove, I was always thinking, who else is on this train? What might my neighbour have seen?

“But despite the paranoia, I liked it.

“I was getting money fast and quick – 45 min and 90 min – that became an addiction. But it wasn’t the money after a certain stage, a lot of it came from power.”

One evening, at a meeting in a restaurant, the fixers fired up a laptop and showed Swaibu how the cogs fitted together.

“They showed me this platform which had our team names and how much money was being bet on them live, in play,” he says.

“You could see the odds on the market moving up and down, red and green. It was in Chinese, but if you converted into pounds, for one game, there was a million riding on it.”

It wasn’t just the fixers who were keeping a close eye on the market though.

Swaibu’s occasional underperformance – “maybe one step to the right of where you should be or two steps to the left” – wasn’t raising suspicions. It was the dramatic movement of money instead.

Bookmakers, usually protected and in profit thanks to margins and finely-tuned odds, were losing on National League South.

They were seeing floods of money on certain teams’ games from newly-opened accounts located all over the world – tipsters who would bet exclusively on the English sixth tier and with unerring accuracy.

More money was reportedly placed on the total goals in one November 2012 National League South game than on the equivalent market for a Champions League match involving Barcelona.

Bookmakers started refusing to take wagers on some teams, scrubbing them off the coupon. The Football Association launched an investigation into betting patterns in the division.

As the season came to a close, the fixing was an open secret in some dressing rooms. Fans were suspecting their own players, accusing them from the stands.

The situation couldn’t last. The net was closing in. Swaibu’s final Bromley fix – ensuring they lost an April 2013 fixture away to Maidenhead by two clear goals – bordered on farce.

Swaibu gave their striker a clear run on goal to score the game’s first. Into the second half, he stayed rooted to the ground as they scored again to lead 3-1. A team-mate scored in the 82nd minute to make it 3-2. Two minutes later, Swaibu held a needlessly high line, chased back aimlessly and allowed Maidenhead to make it 4-2.

An incensed team-mate who wasn’t in on the fix was sitting on the bench, telling the manager that something suspicious was unfolding in front of them.

“It was the first time it had been that blatant and obvious and I didn’t want to face the dressing room,” Swaibu says.

“I was a mouse. The bubble had popped in that moment.

“When I walked into the dressing room I couldn’t look up. It was silent, everyone looking at me.

“The only thing I could hear was the gaffer – a grown man in his fifties – weeping.

“I didn’t get in the shower, I just went straight to my car.”

Swaibu left the club two games later, at the end of the season.

He wasn’t the only fixer who realised the National League South had come under too much scrutiny.

A clutch of players left Hornchurch – another team in the league – and travelled around the world to play for Southern Stars, a lower-league team based on the outskirts of Melbourne, Australia.

Their arrival didn’t go unnoticed. Sportradar – a company hired to monitor and maintain the integrity of sports events – had suspicions. The players’ social media posts from Australia, featuring extravagant holidays in Bali and high-end nightclubs, only heightened them.

The Australian police were tipped off and the Southern Stars’ dressing room, clubhouse and even goalposts were rigged with hidden microphones.

Undercover officers posed as fans, phone calls were intercepted and bank transfers examined.

It led to a string of convictions, a clutch of leads and, ultimately, a sting operation by the National Crime Agency in south London.

By then, Swaibu could well have been out of the game, both legal and illegal.

He says he had saved up around £200,000 from fixing football.

And, at 24, playing football seemed to be over. Two short-term deals with Sutton and Whitehawk led nowhere.

“But I was addicted at this point, something was pulling me back in.”

One of Swaibu’s contacts had been tapped up by a new group of fixers – a gang trying to break into match-rigging and put together a network of players to pull it off.

Swaibu had his suspicions. The new fixers didn’t seem to know the rules. They seemed naive and inexperienced, with little idea of what was possible.

They dropped names of other match-fixers they had worked with, when discretion and secrecy were key to Swaibu’s previous bosses.

Some were also white, British and middle-aged, an unlikely profile for hi-tech gambling conspiracies, invariably leveraged from Asia.

Swaibu wanted to believe though. Because if they were new to fixing, they could be fleeced.

Swaibu says he took a photo of his local five-a-side team and told the fixers they were players in his pocket. He invited his new contacts to a League Two match between AFC Wimbledon and Dagenham and Redbridge and told them it was rigged. It would end, Swaibu said, in a 1-0 win for Wimbledon.

He met Sanjey Ganeshan and Chann Sankaran – two match-fixing middlemen chasing players for their mysterious backers – in person for the first time in an alleyway down the side of Kingsmeadow.

Initially, it went to plan. Swaibu, Ganeshan and Sankaran watched Wimbledon head down the tunnel at half-time with a 1-0 lead.

Swaibu took the duo to a restaurant and demanded his £5,000 “pocket money” for attending the meeting and proving his credentials.

But then things went south.

Ganeshan and Sankaran saw on their phones that Dagenham and Redbridge had scored. The “fix” wasn’t coming in. They argued with Swaibu. Swaibu went to leave.

As he did so, some of his fellow diners looked up at him. The restaurant was strangely busy for a Tuesday night.

And as Swaibu walked to his car, he was surrounded.

“I knew it was real when they put the plastic cuffs on me,” he says. “I knew it was game over.”

The mysterious backers who had recruited Ganeshan and Sankaran weren’t real though. They were a phantom syndicate created by the NCA.

For Swaibu the door locked once more.

He was sentenced to 16 months in April 2015 for conspiracy to commit bribery.

During his time in prison he was visited by his two-year-old daughter, whose arrival had given him the motivation, or perhaps self-justification, to turn to the fixers in the first place.

“She came running into the visitors’ hall, as two-year-olds do, and just ran straight towards me,” says Swaibu.

“She didn’t say anything, she just held me tight and didn’t want to let go. For the next two hours I couldn’t speak.

“After she had left I sat in that cell and I said to myself: ‘Forget the money, forget football, forget everything, how do I go back to the beginning?'”

The past remains. But Swaibu is now using it to shape a better future for himself and the game he loves.

Since his release, Swaibu has worked with football’s world governing body Fifa, industry organisation Sport Integrity Global Alliance and the Premier League to understand the psychology and strategies of match-fixers.

He also works with these groups to identify and safeguard individuals who are vulnerable to becoming involved in corruption.

Sport’s Strangest Crimes: Confessions of a Match Fixer

Moses Swaibu was a teenage star, but as he slipped down the ladder he climbed the criminal ranks, turning to match fixing

Listen now on BBC Sounds.

Previously on Insight