The man behind "322 mafia" scandal confirms most of accusations against him during a bizarre stream — but not the Alberkaaa girl setup story
The person in the middle of the latest match-fixing scandal, the guy behind the scheme in Morf's video, Anton "SayLich" Monetin decided to react to the accusations in a very unusual manner. He jumped on stream of another content creator, and had a long talk about it. And if you think he denied everything and tried to claim he was innocent, you couldn't be further from truth.
The stream was bizarre, to say the least. The accused person, Anton Monetin, did not try to deny anything or defend himself — instead, he answered questions and provided info about the schemes, including those which were not covered by the video itself. He denied a few crucial points of Morf's work — for example, he said that the insane set up with recruiting Alberkaaa through sex with his acquaintance was blatantly false, and that there was no "infiltration" of his Discord. But not once he tried to imply his own innocence.
One very important thing to keep in mind — Monetin is not a reliable narrator at all. He is implicated in a serious way, might be interested in painting a bigger image of himself, and if Morf's investigation is to be believed, is willing to manipulate and lie to reach his goals. So, even though he admits a lot of stuff, you shouldn’t really take his word on all of this anyway. Team Spirit manager Dmitry "Korb3n" Belov holds the same opinion:
It's hard to trust Monetin without a serious evidence, when he is, obviously, greedy and dumb as a rock. He will lie about anything just to get a profit.
So, with that being said, let's work through the key claims of the guy:
- There was no infiltrator in the team, "agent" was working with them, but decided to leak it all after an argument
- There was no sex set up to recruit alberkaaa, and the guy is innocent
- How much money the bettors and players are getting from fixing matches on various levels
- Some Major-winning players of the recent years were involved in match-fixing in the past.
- Webcams don't help to ensure integrity, at least not on D2CL — players just move the mouse "while watching the stream on their screen".
- The fraudster wants to create his own EEU ESIC to fight... match-fixing!
There was no infiltrator in the team
According to Anton’s claims, the “agent” in the video didn't infiltrate anything. Instead, it was just one of his “workers”, who decided to leak everything after the personal conflict with SayLich over $500. And Monetin is sure that he won’t get in trouble in his circles because of it: “If anyone will come to me, I will say that I did nothing wrong, I just shared the info with my worker. Not my fault, go to him, here is his name and address”.
The fraudster also denied accusations of controlling players or teams. Instead, he insists that most of the time players find the betting groups on their own and offer to fix certain outcomes. And in most cases, it's not full teams working with the fixers, but just a player or two. In these cases there is no exclusivity, and these players might be selling this info to multiple groups, leading to some of them getting burned by bookmakers getting more alert.
There was no sex set up to recruit Alberkaaa
SayLich also claimed that some of the accused in the video players are innocent, that they might know something, but never did anything. Among them he named DM. And he also completely refuted the story about Alberkaaa. Not only the player presumably did nothing — “he is impenetrable, like a Pudge with 40k passive stacks”, says Anton — but the whole story about the girl was a lie.
The voice message with Alberkaaa is completely taken out of context. It’s a conversation with his girl and my friend, with just a little trolling. I will defend him until the end: I have all the conversations, I’m ready to show them to cybercats management. He never did 322. The part about the player who is “ready to do anything” was about a completely different person.
A girl friend from Saint-Petersburg was visiting me. We went to the club together, and after that I gave the keys to one of my apartments in Moscow to her and Alberkaaa. So, we just had an ironic conversation that he is now our lap dog. In reality, he is a shy guy who never did anything — don’t ruin this guy’s career. I won’t deny, I wanted to recruit him for 322, but it didn’t go anywhere.
How much money they were making on match-fixing
When talking about money and the limits on betting platforms, Anton was also weirdly eager to share information. He claims that matches on tier-4 events and DPC qualifiers allow match-fixers to earn around $1k on bets. At events on the level of EPL — $2-3k per match. D2CL is $10k, and on DPC it all depends on the match and the odds.
The players are getting around 50-70% of the money won from the match. But sometimes they fail to achieve the needed result, and have to work it off. In the league on the EPL level, they owe around $2k. If that happens in the Upper Division, they need to return $30k.
He says that they had months where they were making a lot of money, and had months where they were making nothing. The biggest issue is bookmakers getting suspicious: “On DPC qualifiers the limits are very small. If you bet, like, $120 on a match there from 50 accounts, everyone will just close the bets on this match”.
Right now in the Lower Division of EEU there are about 3 clean teams in which there are no players involved in 322. In the rest of them there are players who are either doing it right now, or were doing it in the past. A huge amount of people know about it. And even among the champions of the Majors in the last few years there are players who were involved in match-fixing in the past.
Overall, Monetin was talking about all this like he wasn't just accused of setting up a major fraud scheme, but as if he just had another day in the office. For example, in one of the cases he was outraged by Wildcard Gaming, who asked his group to bet on their win, but then “got shit on”. “Who the f*ck does that, how is that even possible?!”, said SayLich.
D2CL stories and Luna-S9 bans
He also had something to say about the D2CL, including the story which led to 10 players, members of Luna Gaming and S9, getting banned at the end of 2022. Monetin claims that almost every player on the rosters really wasn’t involved in match-fixing, just like they claimed, and their side of the story about account swapping was true. Someone still made money on it, but Anton didn't name the person.
But he also acknowledges that there is a lot of fraud on D2CL: shares the rumors that slots at the event were easy to buy for $5-10k, and elaborates on some of the schemes used there, like the high level "smurfing" with decent players performing under the cover of a no-name stack. And the protection measures that were implemented by the admins were found laughable by him:
So, D2CL decided that to prevent another Luna-S9 situation, they need to demand that players have to use webcams. So, you think that helped? No shot. Players are now just sitting on cameras pretending to be playing while looking at the match stream on their screen. A man can earn $500 for an hour of this circus, just looking at the screen and moving his mouse.
The fraudster doesn't like the work environment
But the craziest part of the stream wasn't even the way he was talking and revealing more details of his activities. No, Monetin revealed that with this new publicity, he wants to make a move similar to a "black hat" hacker transitioning to "white hat" and working in infosec for the "good guys". He "doesn't like the instability", everyone being nervous, having constant conflicts because someone wanted more, bad working environment. So he wants to work on creating a commission similar to ESIC (them he called "easy to bribe").
The idea is to combine honest and dishonest bettors in one structure, which will offer its services to the tournament organizers. And to prevent someone from covering their people, create "media cases" out of it.
Here we have players who understand how to fix matches unnoticed. We let them watch the replays, listen to voice chat recordings, evaluate team form and individual performances when something weird happens. The next piece are betting specialists. There is a special software which tracks unusual odds and line movements. We used it to see how matches are being "killed" by fixers' activity.
And we add outside specialists to it, who talk to managers when we need to get some information from the teams. And they will look for information to prove or disprove the suspicion of fraud.
There are not many fixing bettors around. Everyone knows everyone. In EEU community it's around 10 people. They talk to each other sometimes to not let conflicts happen, when one side wants to fix one team, and the other is working on the other. So, we could give the detailed technical evaluation of the match from our point of view and knowledge.
The final part of the puzzle is the media part. We promote our investigations in the community, in the media, so people wouldn't be able to evade the responsibility. Valve doesn't give a sh*t. You message them about HYDRA, they go: "Well, we'll answer that at some point." They only ban Chinese teams who fix matches on the Majors, earning $200-300k per match. Esports is all based on bookmakers right now, it's not a secret that they are sponsoring everything that is going on here. And when they understand that they are being f*cked over, they are shocked. That's how these Chinese bans were forced.
Monetin even goes as far as suggesting to make players go through tests on polygraph. He thinks that you need to use some "pills" if you'd want to pass it, so "no fraudster would agree to it". Anton is sure that this way it's possible to ensure that every match is "clean" for tournament organizers. "How much dishonest teams will still be there if every 9 out of 10 of them will get banned?", asks the dude who is setting up match-fixing schemes in Dota 2 for a living.
I was offering this product to certain organizations, but they didn't know who I am. I needed to prove who I am and what I know. And right now, thanks to Morf, I don't need to do that. The idea of an independent organization was around for a long time. It's just until this moment no-one was interested in it. If bookies and viewers will learn how much 322 is on the market in reality, Dota 2 will just die. It will cease to exist as an esports title. Everything is sponsored by bookmaking companies, and every second team is fucking them over, even on the Major. I've never seen in my life things like what Knights did.
After watching all that, I remembered the story of "ESIC whistleblower", uncovered by Richard Lewis a few months back. The guy, Aleksey "Yarabeu" Kurlov, was also fixing matches in the past, but then decided to "help fight the issue" and joined ESIC. According to him, after a while he got disillusioned by the inner works and lack of efficiency in the organization — they wanted him to prove his suspicions with something substantial instead of just claiming someone was a match-fixer based on second-hand screenshots and gossip.
So he decided to blow the cover on their "extortion scheme". While doing so, he accused multiple players of fixing matches without proof, allegedly blackmailed a team, and even claimed that when Lewis was trying to get to the bottom of the story, he was actually just trying to steal the spotlight. So, what's up with insane match-fixers turning into the fighters against match-fixing?
