Former UK soccer player aims to establish the world’s top training platform educating athletes about sports integrity.
LONDON — Nearly 11 years after his conviction for fixing matches, Moses Swaibu sat at a conference table inside Wembley Stadium telling a group of Harvard exchange students about his past assisting one of the world’s most notorious match-fixing gangs.
As a teen prodigy for Crystal Palace’s youth soccer squad, Swaibu dreamed of competing at the famed venue that has hosted English national team matches, NFL games and the 2007 FA Cup final.
At a sports integrity summit last month, Swaibu addressed the Harvard business students against the backdrop of Wembley’s colourful stands. There, the students spoke openly about how their generation views gambling as a means for earning pocket change or paying school fees.
Swaibu, however, is laser-focused on preventing players from being tempted by gambling-related enticements.
“The shift from seeing betting as a pastime to a potential lifeline changes everything,” Swaibu said. “It reframes the entire challenge of integrity from one of vulnerability, pressure and economic reality.”
Following a four-month stint in prison, Swaibu worked to reform himself, meeting with officials from FIFA and the English Premier League to educate them on the underpinnings of a sophisticated match-fixing enterprise.
In his quest to prepare young players for what comes with rigging a match, Swaibu founded GameChanger 360, a platform that provides athletes with modular learning on integrity in sports. Now, Swaibu is readying GameChanger’s expansion into the US months before North America hosts the World Cup.
He also wrote a memoir, “Fixed: My Secret Life As a Match Fixer“, about his experiences. The memoir is a “compelling and necessary story”, wrote Nicolas Sayde of the Council of Europe, who last April organised a two-day summit in Quebec on preserving integrity in sports by combating illegal sports betting and manipulation.
Swaibu’s association with Asian syndicate
A towering defender for Crystal Palace, Swaibu faced the likes of Southampton’s Gareth Bale and Manchester United’s Danny Welbeck when the clubs’ youth squads met in the mid-2000s. For Swaibu’s proficiency in the classroom at Crystal Palace academy and his leadership skills on the pitch, the club named him its Scholar of the Year and Vice Presidents Young Player of the Year for the 2006-2007 season.
After leaving Crystal Palace in 2008, Swaibu made 15 appearances for Bromley F.C. before settling with English Football League club Lincoln City for four years. By 2011, he returned to Bromley, where he made a salary of £850 a week. In the memoir, he recalled being at a Holiday Inn on the outskirts of Northampton when he was offered £60K along with two teammates to rig the outcome of a match.
“As soon as I saw the bag with £60K in it, I knew this was serious,” Swaibu said. “All they did was reaffirm it.”
Unbeknownst to Swaibu, he was becoming connected to Dan Tan Seet Eng, a Singapore businessman identified by Interpol as the alleged mastermind of a global ring that fixed hundreds of matches worldwide.
While Swaibu and his teammates did not ensure the desired outcome, the meeting led to a subsequent one in 2012 at the Mayfair Hotel in London to discuss similar attempts. During the 2012-13 season, Swaibu participated in nearly a dozen fixed matches, two of which he received £200K from for his efforts.
Deep in the weeds of match fixing
Describing Tan in his 2025 memoir, Swaibu did not depict the alleged kingpin as brash, muscular or intimidating.
Recounting the Mayfair Hotel encounter, the diminutive Tan did not act like a “loud gangster type you see in movies”, Swaibu wrote. Instead, he maintained a calm, almost unassuming presence without resorting to aggressive tactics.
“He uses his composed authority, built on trust and loyalty,” Swaibu wrote in the book. “The way he talks about gambling is like that of a philosopher, someone who has been through it all and understands the game better than anyone.”
Tan later spent more than two years in jail before a Singapore court ordered his release in November 2015, ruling that the allegations failed to meet the standards required by the nation’s detention law.
At meetings with Tan’s associates, Swaibu sat idly in bemusement at the elaborate nature of their scheming. On one occasion, members of the enterprise informed Swaibu that Bromley needed to lead 2-0 at the half before notching a third goal after halftime for a three-goal aggregate. Players taking part could receive £25,000 for standard games, with step-ups to £100,000 for exact-timed goals or penalties that resulted in a red card.
Fix in for Swaibu, others
Swaibu took part in one pre-fix meeting with members of Hayes & Yeading United where players from both teams were told that the match needed to end in a 4-0 victory for Hayes. Not only that: the fixers required Bromley to allow three goals in the first 15 minutes of the match. In a suite at the Mayfair, the players rehearsed a script for a breakaway on the second goal and a penalty on the third. Hayes prevailed 4-0, ensuring a hefty payout for the ring.
By interacting with the syndicate, Swaibu told iGB that he was being taught how the world of match fixing would look over the next few decades.
“They programmed my mind to understand data in real time, then translated that into monetary value on illegal betting markets,” Swaibu said.
Following the 2012-2013 season, Bromley did not offer Swaibu a new contract. He appeared in four matches for Whitehawk F.C., his final matches as a player, before his January 2014 indictment on match fixing.
Swaibu subsequently spent six years advising football officials and clubs on how to curb the influences of match manipulation. At one point, four ex-Man U players informed him that they had been approached by match fixers. None reportedly accepted a bribe.
Swaibu and his deep Rolodex in soccer
Over the last several years, Swaibu worked closely with some of the world’s most influential officials in the sports integrity industry. The list includes officials from FIFA, the Football Association in the UK, the English Premier League and UEFA, the governing body for football in Europe.
Perhaps the most fortuitous encounter is one Swaibu had with Chris Eaton, a former Interpol official who served as FIFA’s head of security in the 2010 World Cup. Before leaving FIFA in 2012, Eaton spent two years with the association, where he targeted gangs that infiltrated global soccer to fix gambling markets. Eaton concentrated his efforts on the Southeast Asian market, where two companies recorded handle of more than $2 billion a week.
In 2021, Swaibu flew from London to Paris, then commuted to Lyon to meet with Eaton for an hour.
“That hour was probably the most important hour I’ve had with anyone in the last 10 years,” Swaibu told iGB. “You can almost imagine the knowledge of information that he had while he believed in the message and the mission that I was on.”
The meeting with Eaton led to connections with a bevy of others in the sports integrity community. Swaibu has given presentations on Gamechanger to the UEFA Fight The Fix conference and an anti-match fixing summit between the Asian Football Conferederation and the Football Association of Singapore.
More recently, he has met with Aaron Ingalls, a special agent with the FBI. Upon the publication of Fixed, Ingalls described Swaibu’s story as “compelling,” adding that it is inspiring to see how he has recovered. In turn, Swaibu has held discussion with Ingalls on policing match fixing at the World Cup, where the FBI has set up a task force.
Swaibu plans on drawing on his connections to increase his imprint across the US. He might present at a FIFA summit on integrity in May, the final one being held by the association before the World Cup.
Turning to AI to combat match fixing
With first-hand knowledge on the psychological forces that drive an international match-fixing ring, Swaibu is educating players on how to avoid his missteps. With a keen eye on spotting a fixed match, Swaibu believes he can detect when a defender’s shoulders are turned the wrong way to allow a striker to receive a clear path. He conceived GameChanger as the world’s first AI-driven large language model to combat match fixing.
Through his work, Swaibu has developed detailed flow charts that map the environmental context of the athlete. The learning modules provide players with a robust defence against manipulation, with coursework on the attitudes, beliefs and practises that influence untoward behaviour. The modules also contain role-playing sequences for players on how to defend themselves if approached by a nefarious individual.
Moreover, the programme offers an analysis of risk, social forces, family interactions and sports environment to assist troubled players. On one chart, Swaibu cited the case of Calvin Ridley, the first prominent NFL player to bet on his own team after PASPA.
Sidelined by a broken ankle, Ridley admitted to feeling depressed away from his Atlanta Falcons teammates. Ridley later wrote in an essay for The Players Tribune that he needed an outlet and looked for something to make his day go faster. While he placed at least $1,500 on a variety of bets, including parlays that involved the Falcons, a league investigation determined that Ridley never bet on his team to lose.
“I f—ed up. I’m not here to sugarcoat anything,” Ridley wrote. “I made the worst mistake of my life by gambling on football.”
Swaibu himself could empathise. He began his professional career in Lincoln, which he described as a “sleepy city” with little entertainment each night beyond his PlayStation.
Commonalities with the US betting market
Amid three major sports betting scandals in the US, Swaibu has drawn comparisons with the sophisticated schemes in North America and the one that rocked English football about 15 years ago. In January, federal prosecutors in Philadelphia indicted 20 Division I college basketball players in arguably the biggest NCAA point-shaving scandal in 75 years.
As with the English scandal, the match fixers remained in close contact with the athletes on a number of occasions. Around halftime of a 2024 South Carolina State-Coppin State game, lead defendant Jalen Smith furiously texted an Eagles player with an urgent message: He needed to deliberately underperform so South Carolina State would cover the spread.
“Wtf u doing[,] it need to be a blowout,” Smith wrote. “You hooping yo a** off wtf … U supposed to be … losing[,] you costing us money …”
Two presumed ringleaders in the college basketball case, Shane Hennen and Marves Fairley, are also facing charges in a separate sports betting investigation in Brooklyn. The federal probe in New York has ensnared three NBA figures, including Portland Trail Blazers coach Chauncey Billups. On the West Coast, at least three bookmakers have pleaded guilty to running multi-million illegal sports betting operations over the last 24 months.
One of the bookies, professional poker player Damien LeForbes, is also facing charges in connection with crypto money laundering at a Las Vegas casino. As the World Cup nears, Swaibu is troubled that match-fixing enforcement has become more challenging with the proliferation of cutting-edge crypto payment systems and digital wallets that allow syndicates to further their schemes.
Swaibu’s methods to aid players against match fixing
Asked to identify some tools that could assist athletes in rejecting any match fixers, Swaibu proposed the following measures.
—Understanding how fixers actually operate. The players probably never had anyone explain to them how fixers attempt to ingratiate themselves with the athlete, Swaibu said. “Fixers don’t approach players with cash and a proposition. They approach with friendship, belief and with attention when no one else seems to care.”
—A trusted message from a proven voice. The athletes, Swaibu said, need to hear the message from someone who has personally received the threats themselves. “When a compliance officer reads from a script, a 19-year-old’s brain checks out.”
–-A way out. Targeted players need somewhere to turn without fear of retribution. Swaibu recommends a “confidential channel” for players to report possibled enticements for illicit behaviour. He alluded to a scenario where a player is wondering why someone continually offers to buy him dinner. With the GameChanger platform, the player can seek advice without triggering an investigation. “Most players stay silent because they’re afraid of the process. That silence is what fixers count on.”
Reducing athlete harassment from sports betting
Next month, Swaibu will present a webinar for students at the University of Minnesota. Earlier this month, members of a student-athlete commission from the conference urged NCAA President Charlie Baker to continue efforts to have state regulators across the US restrict prop bets involving college athletes.
Swaibu has not set a target on the number of partnering schools, but he wants GameChanger to be the leading provider in the world for player training around sports integrity. Given his experience with match fixers such as Tan, Swaibu believes he is in a unique position to relate to vulnerable athletes.
“That’s what prevention actually looks like, not more rules, not stricter punishments — education that lands from someone who lived it, with a safe place to turn before it’s too late,” Swaibu said.
Matt Rybaltowski
Matt is primarily responsible for long-form feature coverage on complex sports betting scandals. He also provides coverage on finance, M&A and other technological developments.
