The Wild Story of How the Russian Mafia Faked the IPL on a Farm in India
The pitch was dusty, the field uneven. Cows had probably grazed here not long before. There were no grandstands, no roaring crowds, no VIP boxes. Just a single camera mounted at a distance, locked into one angle. It was watching a group of teenage boys in ill-fitting jerseys pretend they were the stars of the richest cricket league on earth. And for a short while, some people believed it.
Those believers were Russian gamblers. Mafiosos. Shadowy figures watching these games from smoke-choked bars in Moscow. They placed their bets in real time, convinced they were watching the world-famous Indian Premier League. In truth, it was a theatrical production. The pantomime staged on farmland in Gujarat, India, starred farmhands and unemployed kids earning five dollars a match. The real IPL had ended three weeks earlier.
Lights, Camera, Con Job
There’s something almost comical about it now. A YouTube channel with 255 subscribers suddenly began “broadcasting” what it claimed was ongoing IPL action. The jerseys looked more Party City than Puma. The field looked like something you’d find behind a community center, not a billion-dollar sports empire.
And yet, the production was just convincing enough. A wide shot. Crackling commentary. Real-sounding team names. The CricHeroes app, which many amateur players use to track their stats, gave the games an air of legitimacy. Bets started rolling in. Russian bars tuned in. The con was live. But who would fall for such an obvious fake? As it turns out: people who really, really wanted to gamble.
What really sold it all though, was the polish. Somehow, in this forgotten farming village, someone created a live feed convincing enough to pass as the real IPL. According to Scroll, “The accused had set up high-resolution cameras on the ground and used computer-generated graphics to display scores on a live-streaming screen.”
Meet the Russian Villains: From Moscow to Mehsana
The man at the center of it has only one name: Efimov. That’s all the Indian police have so far. A reputed Russian mafia boss, Efimov is thought to have financed the operation through two intermediaries named Asif Mohammed and Ashok Chaudhary.
Mohammed, a Pakistani national, had ties to underground betting networks. Chaudhary, an Indian man with a gift for logistics, sourced the jerseys, recruited the players, and arranged the sites. They had experience in putting together low-rent cricket “leagues” like the Century Hitters T20 and the Big Boss Punjab League. Their competitions always sounded official but were little more than sandlot matches in disguise.
The duo’s plan took shape in a Moscow bar infamous for laundering gambling cash. That’s where they met Shoeb Davda. The man they called Shoeb didn’t look like a criminal mastermind. He looked like a bartender, because he was. For months, Shoeb Davda worked the taps in a smoky Russian dive bar where the only thing flowing faster than the vodka was the underground money on cricket bets. But Shoeb had one advantage no one else in that bar did: he had actually played a bit of cricket. And that made him dangerous.
How the Fix Worked
The setup was devilishly simple. Bets were taken in Russia by mafia-connected bookies. The outcomes were determined in real time by a chain of communication that started on the Telegram app. From there, instructions were relayed to Davda in India, who passed them on to a man named Mohammad Kolu, the “umpire.” Kolu held a walkie-talkie.
When a bet came in like someone wagering that the next ball would be a wide, Kolu would call it a wide. It didn’t matter where the ball landed. No one could challenge the call. After all, there was only one camera. There were no replays. No DRS. And no third umpire. In one match, a batter scored six runs for what looked like a blooper that barely cleared the square. The ball seemed to travel ten, maybe fifteen feet in the air.
The Russian Field of Screams
According to an article from Storypick, “Shoeb hired the farm of Ghulam Masih and installed halogen lights there,” said Inspector Bhavesh Rathod, the local officer who led the investigation. “He readied 21 farm laborers, promising them Rs 400 per match. Next, he hired cameramen and bought T‑shirts of IPL teams.”
The field was in Molipur, a dusty village in Gujarat’s Mehsana district. It was nobody’s idea of Eden Gardens. But with a few halogen lights and a single high-definition camera, the farmland was transformed into a low-rent version of professional cricket.
No one watching from Moscow could see the livestock off-camera. They could only see the colored jerseys, the scoreboard graphics, and hear the voices of enthusiastic announcers, who, in truth, were just local guys mimicking real IPL commentary from YouTube videos. The illusion was good enough to keep the rubles flowing.
The Players Who Didn’t Know How to Play
The participants weren’t athletes. They were hired hands. Some were teenagers from nearby villages. Others were laborers looking for quick cash. Most were paid the equivalent of five dollars per game, with no training and no expectation of performance.
They were told to mimic the motions of real cricket. Run between the wickets. Bowl some spin. Celebrate catches. But their actions often gave them away. Bowlers forgot to attempt run outs. Batters ran when they shouldn’t have. The “action” had a quality somewhere between rehearsal and improv comedy. One police investigator later called it “a community theater version of the IPL.”
The Russian Walkie-Talkie League
“Shoeb would take live bets over the Telegram channel,” Inspector Rathod explained. “He would instruct Kolu, the umpire, over a walkie‑talkie to signal fours and sixes. Kolu communicated the same to the batsman and the bowler. Acting on the instructions, the bowler would deliver a slow ball, enabling the batsman to hit it for a four or a six.”
The umpires were directing the game. Every wide, every six, every dramatic dismissal was premeditated. The signals weren’t hand gestures but, instead, audio commands disguised as officiating. When the umpire raised his hand, it wasn’t to uphold the rules. It was because someone in Moscow had just bet a thousand rubles on a boundary. It was performance art in the age of digital deception. A real-time theatre of the absurd with real money on the line.
And Then the Police Arrive
It didn’t take long for the operation to raise red flags. Local police had been monitoring illegal gambling activities across Gujarat and got wind of strange cricket matches being broadcast from a rural field. The players weren’t local league stars. The game didn’t seem sanctioned. Something was off.
When the police raided the site, they found 21 individuals on the field and several more operating cameras, equipment, and comms. Among the arrested were Shoeb Davda, Asif Mohammed, and Mohammad Kolu. Ashok Chaudhary was apprehended shortly after. As of now, Efimov remains a ghost. He is still just name without a face, slipping through international jurisdiction like smoke through fingers.
Just Three Weeks Later…
What made the entire operation feel brazen, almost operatic in its absurdity, was the timing. “Three weeks after the Indian Premier League … ended this year,” Quartz noted in its investigation, “a fraudulent version began in a small village in Mehsana.”
It was like a shadow cast by the real thing. A sequel no one asked for. The real IPL had wrapped up with fireworks and global headlines. The fake one opened in anonymity and ended in handcuffs. But in that three-week window, this ghost league fooled a small army of bettors, and for a brief moment, farmhands in knockoff jerseys were the stars of a digital con that spanned continents.
Betting, Blindness, and the Russian Will to Believe
At its core, this was a psychological study in desperation. Gambling doesn’t rely on truth more so than belief. If the conditions are close enough Many people won’t look too closely. If the jerseys look right, if the commentary is enthusiastic, if the app says it’s official then that’s all they need. Especially when they want to believe it’s real.
The Russian bettors weren’t fooled because the production was flawless. They were fooled because the illusion was just good enough for them to suspend disbelief. In a way, it was performance art for profit. And in another way, it was theft.
The Larger Game & Why This Happened
Cricket’s popularity has exploded in the last decade, and with it, a vast ecosystem of legal and illegal betting. In countries where regulations are tight and options are few, underground operations find ways to flourish. Russia’s ban on many Western brands including McDonald’s (now rebranded as “Tasty. Period”) and Coca-Cola (“Nice Cola”)has left a cultural vacuum that black market enterprises are all too eager to fill.
In India, where gambling on cricket is technically illegal in most states, these games occupy a grey area between entertainment and exploitation. This wasn’t the first fake league, either. In 2020, there was the “Uva Premier League” in Sri Lanka, which had its own betting scandal. But the sheer audacity of staging a fake IPL just weeks after the real one ended? That’s new. And it likely won’t be the last.
The Curtain Falls
Not long after the arrests, the YouTube channel was taken down. The police confiscated the jerseys. The pitch, once a stage, went back to being farmland. And cows returned to graze where once sixes had flown (allegedly). But one question remains.
Where is Efimov?
The man behind the Russian Cricket Con is out there, probably planning another fake league in another forgotten field, waiting for bettors who never learn. Because if there’s one thing this story proves, it’s that when it comes to sports, people will believe almost anything… as long as there’s a bet on the line.
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