Ghost Games

This is taken off the Telegraph Web site.

"It was the kind of comeback of which Sir Alex Ferguson’s Manchester United would have been proud. One-nil down with minutes remaining – and with their opponents having missed a penalty and dominated the game – FC Slutsk scored two late goals to snatch a 2-1 victory against Shakhter Soligorsk.


The match reports on the official websites of both clubs recounted a truly dramatic encounter between the Belarusian Premier League pair just over a fortnight ago.


Slutsk would have been underdogs from the start, having spent just one season in the top flight, in which they had twice lost against a Shakhter side involved in the Europa League this season and which previously graced the Champions League. Indeed, Slutsk had been in the country’s third tier as recently as four years ago, making a victory against Shakhter a surprise in itself, never mind the manner of it.


All this would have been reflected in the odds offered before and during the game by bookmakers such as bet365 and SBOBET, odds that should have been increasingly in Shakhter’s favour.


Except most people backing them were doomed to lose from the outset, because FC Slutsk 2 Shakhter Soligorsk 1 was always going to be the final score of a match Inside Sport can reveal never took place.

Slutsk v Shakhter was, in fact, the latest and arguably most serious example of what has been dubbed colloquially as a 'ghost’ game.

The newest weapon in the armoury of the match-fixer, a ghost game is a fictitious fixture designed to defraud bookmakers and rip off honest punters as part of a global betting market in which £90 billion is laundered annually.

It is perpetrated either by corrupt employees of teams or of sports data-gathering firms, those with the computing skills to plant false information, or any combination of the three."

very hard to believe