Former professional footballer Moses Swaibu still vividly remembers the moment he met Tan Seet Eng, the 5ft 5in, chain-smoking Singaporean kingpin of what was reputed to be the world’s biggest match-fixing syndicate.
Until that point, the future had looked bright for Swaibu, then a 23-year-old defender, who had been voted Crystal Palace’s young player of the year five years earlier and tipped for a glittering Premier League career. Yet, here he was, in a five-star hotel room in Mayfair being asked to lose the following day’s game between his team Bromley and opposing side Eastbourne.
‘Tan’s presence filled a room without any need to raise his voice,’ says Swaibu of that meeting in August 2012. ‘You could feel his control – the way he held his cigarette, the way he watched you. He was the promise of easy money. He said, if [I lost the match], they’d pay me 20 grand.’
With that fateful offer, Swaibu claims he was lured into the illegal underworld of match-fixing.
Over the next 12 months, he rigged games by deliberately conceding goals to net his criminal paymasters millions of pounds on Asian betting markets. And his clandestine side-hustle paid handsomely. After just seven ‘fixed’ games, he had earned more than £1million and drove around central London in a Ferrari.
But, addicted to the promise of riches, he failed to heed the syndicate’s oft-repeated warning: ‘Greedy man no see properly.’
Moses Swaibu, pictured playing for Lincoln City in 2010, had a promising future – he had been named Crystal Palace’s young player of the year and was tipped for a successful Premier League career
After an ill-advised meeting with another crime group, which – unbeknown to Swaibu – was under surveillance by the National Crime Agency, he was arrested and sentenced to 16 months in prison in 2015. His experience behind bars was harrowing, measured in monotonous TV reruns and violent inmate-on-inmate attacks – one of which almost killed his cellmate.
But it was a visit from his then two-year-old daughter Taliya that prompted him to turn his life around. ‘All the money that came with match-fixing felt like nothing compared to seeing her have to walk into prison to see me,’ he says. ‘I broke down and thought: “I can never feel like this again”.’
Ten years on, then, and it is a thoughtful Swaibu who meets the Daily Mail to make sense of his remarkable life, as chronicled in his newly-published autobiography Fixed. Now 36, Swaibu devotes his life to Gamechanger 360, the advisory firm he founded in 2023, which works with sporting bodies such as Fifa and the International Olympic Committee to stop other players succumbing to temptation.
‘When you think of how many football players fear getting released by clubs or come to England looking for an opportunity, they are vulnerable [to match-fixing],’ he says. ‘We have to change the culture, starting at the top.’
To understand Swaibu’s story, it’s important to start at the beginning – in his case a childhood in Croydon, south London, in thrall to a brutal father, whom – he claims – regularly locked him out of the house and delivered savage beatings. (His father has never publicly responded to the allegations.)
Football was a release. Local youth club Crystal Palace signed him at 16 and he thrived, making his debut with their first team just two years later. He went on to become the captain of League One club Lincoln City when he was just 18 – attracting the attention of both Birmingham City and, even more influentially, Aston Villa who both made bids for him in 2011.
‘I should have been a Premier League player,’ Swaibu says now. Instead, he was persuaded to sign a new contract at Lincoln – and it proved a terrible sliding doors moment.
Later that year, his team-mate, Delroy Facey, invited him to a hotel room to ‘meet someone’. That someone turned out to be a Russian gangster who offered Swaibu £60,000 to throw the following day’s match against Northampton.
As captain and centre-half at Bromley, Swaibu was uniquely equipped to help manipulate games – and was good at it
Swaibu said no – but it opened his eyes to a potentially lucrative new world. A year later, Swaibu was in a different headspace. He had left Lincoln and was earning just £850 a week at non-league club Bromley – his wages paid in cash in brown paper bags, if they were even paid at all.
His then-partner, Crystal, was expecting their daughter and, after he was fined by Bromley’s manager for skipping training to attend a midwife appointment, he needed the money more than ever before. In August 2012, another former player invited him to meet Tan. This time, Swaibu claimed, his answer was an emphatic yes.
As captain and centre-half at Bromley, Swaibu was uniquely equipped to help manipulate games – and was good at it. He learned to ‘fake run’ when strikers from the opposing team were making their way towards the goal, so he would never be able to catch, block or tackle them. And, when marking them, he would subtly but deliberately stand in the wrong place so they had the space to take a shot. He would then tell off team-mates in mock outrage when it was, in fact, his ‘mistake’ that had cost a goal.
For every game that he fixed, ensuring a specific result for his gambling crime bosses, he – and they – netted tens of thousands. In total, Swaibu helped rig nine Conference League South games for Bromley, with his personal cut from each fix quickly rising from £20,000 per match to £150,000.
The gang communicated on WhatsApp using code names to discuss the next match. Swaibu was referred to as ‘John Gotti’ after the New York mafioso, and given growing responsibility. As well as personally fixing the matches, Swaibu went on to recruit several other players and arrange the distribution of money.
His own cash was stashed in a room at the back of a Chinese takeaway in Dalston, east London, with links to the syndicate. When Swaibu wanted to make a withdrawal, he would park his car – by now an Aston Martin – on a side street, pretend to order food at the counter and be handed a bag full of notes.
By fix number six, the pile of money in the secret room was as high as his torso. By fix seven, it had reached the £1million mark. But Swaibu, once happy on £80 a week at Crystal Palace, still wanted more.
His lifestyle was like something out of the movies. He was part of a group called ‘The Ferrari Boys’, who rented expensive sports cars and raced them around London, criss-crossing the Thames via the Rotherhithe Tunnel. Train travel was always first class and five-star hotels in Mayfair became a regular social setting. After fix eight, he banked £300,000 but admitted feeling ‘like a junkie, craving my next fix’.
Tan Seet Eng, the Singaporean kingpin of what was reputed to be the world’s biggest match-fixing syndicate
By his ninth and final rig in 2013, the cracks were starting to show. His team Bromley needed to lose 4-2 to Maidenhead, and were trailing 3-2 with just minutes to go. To guarantee the fix’s success – and his own illicit pay cheque – Swaibu had to let Maidenhead score one more goal.
As one of their players raced towards the goal, Swaibu says it was ‘obvious’ he made no attempt to stop him. ‘He lashed the ball into the net – and the fix was in.’ His team-mates, however, were disgusted. So much so that Swaibu decided to quit playing – but stay involved in match-fixing on the organisational side.
It proved to be his undoing. At the end of 2013, he got a call from a contact saying that two Singaporean middlemen wanted to meet him to set up a scam for their backers. What none of them knew were that the two associates were themselves being tailed by investigators, who were setting up a police sting operation.
After watching a game between Wimbledon and Dagenham, Swaibu and the two middlemen went for a Chinese meal where they were seized by the National Crime Agency. Swaibu was sentenced to 16 months in prison (serving only four) while Delroy Facey, who had tried to recruit him all those years before, was sentenced to two-and-a-half years during the same trial at Birmingham Crown Court.
As for Tan, who faces match-fixing charges in multiple European countries, he has been arrested multiple times in his native Singapore but has never faced trial. He has not responded to Swaibu’s claims, but has previously denied wrongdoing.
‘Everything is fun and games until you get caught,’ said Swaibu of his own trial. ‘The judge told us how we had ruined the trust of football and its community. My legs felt weak and my body turned cold. I needed cleansing.’
He was first sent to HMP Birmingham where he said he was ‘locked in a small, dull room and time seemed to crawl’. He says: ‘I only told the time by what was on television. When ITV game show The Chase came on, it was lunch. Saturday night was Ant and Dec’s chat show.’
It was when he was moved to HMP Onley midway through his sentence, however, that he came up against the darker side of prison life. One day, another prisoner returned to their cell, slurring his speech and limping with difficulty.
‘At first I thought he was drunk,’ recalls Swaibu. ‘Then he turned and I saw blood oozing from the back of his head.’
His cellmate had gotten into a fight in one of the communal areas. Another prisoner had punched him and he’d fallen, injuring his head.
‘I rang the prison buzzer, banged on the locked door and cried for help. I really thought he was going to die,’ said Swaibu. ‘He survived – but ended up with bruising on the brain.’
Ten years on from his release, and Swaibu has gone some way to being ‘cleansed’ thanks to his work with Gamechanger 360. He recently addressed 1,000 Fifa delegates in Singapore about the dangers of sport-fixing and visited Lausanne, the Swiss headquarters of the International Olympic Committee.
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The smart suits he wears now to address sport’s biggest hitters are a world away from the football kit he once lived in but, as Swaibu puts it: ‘I speak the language of the dressing-room. That is how I can help. I can explain more about the betting rules in 90 seconds than a series of dry messages on club noticeboards ever will.’
And it’s a problem he fears will only get worse. Last year former England striker Ivan Toney made his return to professional football after he was found guilty of 232 breaches of FA betting rules and banned for eight months.
West Ham player Lucas Paqueta also faced a two-year FA investigation following allegations he tried to get yellow cards to win cash for those betting on him. He was eventually cleared last week, with his wife describing the experience as a ‘nightmare’.
As Swaibu puts it: ‘It can take only one player to manage a fix. And the more betting there is on sport, the more players are going to be at risk of getting involved. On a global scale, it is getting worse. Nobody has to meet face-to-face in hotels any more. All they need is a WiFi connection. That’s why I’ve written my book, so people can be safeguarded.’
On his own reasons for getting involved, he reflects: ‘I didn’t have a role model as a kid. By 12, I was living like a grown man, always in survival mode. As a footballer, sometimes I wasn’t even paid. I was vulnerable. I used it as justification to do what I did.’
To say his incredible story has had a happy ending, then, might be an overstatement – but he does believe getting caught saved his life.
‘Today my conscience is clear due to prison, therapy and understanding,’ he says. ’I sleep perfectly fine.’
