How to Scam Online-Gambling Addicts? Set Up a Fake Cricket League
One day in June 2022, a few dozen residents of Molipur — a village in the Indian state of Gujarat — gathered on the edge of a field to watch a game of cricket. The sport is one of India’s most popular pastimes, played by people of all ages, on streets and pavements, in walled compounds and on rooftop terraces, inside urban parks and on dusty, rural grounds. Cricket is so ubiquitous in India that the game in Molipur might have drawn no attention from the villagers, but for its relative sophistication compared with village cricket, which is typically played with a tennis ball and a bat and a little pile of rocks that serves as the wicket, in lieu of stumps. By contrast, this game looked professional: the batsmen wore pads and gloves, the players had team jerseys on and they were playing with a hard, leather ball. There were even two umpires on the field, dressed in white coats. And just like in real cricket games on TV, the umpires had walkie-talkies to communicate with each other.
The game was the opener for a league that was being organised by a village resident named Shoyeb Davda, a chubby man in his mid-thirties, with a wispy beard and thick glasses. The field the players were playing on was a patch of farmland that Davda had leased from a neighbour. In the weeks prior, he had cleared the land of shrubs, levelled it with a tractor, then used a roller to flatten a long strip in the middle. On it, he laid down a cricketing mat that would allow the ball to bounce evenly.
