During the Global Esports Industry Week in Cologne, held alongside the Counter-Strike Major, Pley.gg interviewed the Commissioner of the Esports Integrity Commission (ESIC), Ian Smith. While Smith stated that the overall climate in professional Counter-Strike has improved since the peak of corrupt activity during the pandemic, he confirmed that new sanctions are imminent. These upcoming bans will specifically target the organizers behind match-fixing and cheating in the lower tiers of competition.
Exposing the facilitators of fraud
ESIC plans to issue new sanctions within the next two weeks after having imposed a string of bans within the last couple of months. While these bans will affect lower-level tier two and tier three players, the core focus of the announcement centers on the individuals organizing the corruption. Smith highlighted a shift in how match-fixing operates, turning the attention toward the source of the fraud.
What we are going to see in our announcement is the exposure of past players who have facilitated this fixing, who have facilitated the cheating, who have changed from being cheating, match-fixing players themselves to corrupting younger, lower-tier players and providing them with the means of cheating and the means of fixing,” Smith stated.
Smith emphasized the necessity of removing these individuals permanently from the ecosystem.
That to me is the most important aspect of what’s coming is not just that we’re banning players, but that we’re exposing past players who are bad actors who need to be literally ostracized from the scene,” Smith said. “We are going to ensure that they are ostracized and their names will come as no surprise to anyone who’s familiar with this world.
The threat of second-screen cheating
The methods of cheating in Counter-Strike have evolved. Traditional match-fixing, where a player intentionally drops a map in return for a specific amount of money, has been replaced by a different primary threat.
The biggest integrity threat to Counter-Strike is second screen cheating by some considerable margin, and people refer to it by different names,” Smith explained.
Players in lower-tier online matches receive unauthorized access to game data.
Effectively, people are being supplied, players, particularly in tier two and three Counter-Strike on occasions with a live direct real-time feed of the match they’re playing in, which of course allows them to make disproportionately favorable decisions and therefore win games unfairly,” Smith noted.
This method creates a multi-layered betting fraud cycle. Syndicates bet on these teams to win online matches to qualify for LAN events.
When and if they then qualify for a LAN as a result of their cheating and looking a hell of a lot better than they are at Counter-Strike, those same players and suppliers of that illegal feed know they’re going to lose at the LAN because they’re not as good as they look on paper and they bet on them on the way down,” Smith detailed. “It is a fraud in many ways. Not just cheating to win, but also a betting fraud at every level of that activity.
Operating with limited resources
Despite handling a significant volume of cases, ESIC functions with restricted resources compared to organizations in traditional sports.
We have a very similar case load to the Tennis Integrity Unit, for example,” Smith stated. “They have an annual budget of over $3 million. We are operating on less than 20 percent of that but with the same case load.
The organization relies on a decentralized funding model.
People have to recognize that we’re in a fragmented industry. There’s no governing body that says here’s a budget. We rely on individual tournament operators, betting operators, data companies to collaborate with us and each provide us with a little bit of funding that allows us to operate,” Smith explained.
Confidence in the Cologne Major
Regarding the ongoing Major in Cologne, Smith expressed complete confidence in the integrity of the tournament. The stringent security measures, combined with the high risk of detection, make cheating at top-tier LAN events highly unlikely.
I’m reasonably certain that there’s nothing terrible happening today and that nothing terrible happened yesterday, and I have reasonable faith that nothing terrible is going to happen tomorrow because at this level of tournament what are the opportunities for integrity breaches? It is more or less impossible to cheat,” Smith concluded. “None of these teams have done anything that makes me worried. Our efforts are focused down the line and particularly in online competition.
