Bookmakers, usually protected and in profit thanks to margins and finely-tuned odds, were losing on National League South.
They were seeing floods of money on certain teams’ games from newly-opened accounts located all over the world – tipsters who would bet exclusively on the English sixth tier and with unerring accuracy.
More money was reportedly placed on the total goals in one November 2012 National League South game than on the equivalent market for a Champions League match involving Barcelona.
Bookmakers started refusing to take wagers on some teams, scrubbing them off the coupon. The Football Association launched an investigation into betting patterns in the division.
As the season came to a close, the fixing was an open secret in some dressing rooms. Fans were suspecting their own players, accusing them from the stands.
The situation couldn’t last. The net was closing in. Swaibu’s final Bromley fix – ensuring they lost an April 2013 fixture away to Maidenhead by two clear goals – bordered on farce.
Swaibu gave their striker a clear run on goal to score the game’s first. Into the second half, he stayed rooted to the ground as they scored again to lead 3-1. A team-mate scored in the 82nd minute to make it 3-2. Two minutes later, Swaibu held a needlessly high line, chased back aimlessly and allowed Maidenhead to make it 4-2.
An incensed team-mate who wasn’t in on the fix was sitting on the bench, telling the manager that something suspicious was unfolding in front of them.
“It was the first time it had been that blatant and obvious and I didn’t want to face the dressing room,” Swaibu says.
“I was a mouse. The bubble had popped in that moment.
“When I walked into the dressing room I couldn’t look up. It was silent, everyone looking at me.
“The only thing I could hear was the gaffer – a grown man in his fifties – weeping.
“I didn’t get in the shower, I just went straight to my car.”
Swaibu left the club two games later, at the end of the season.
He wasn’t the only fixer who realised the National League South had come under too much scrutiny.
A clutch of players left Hornchurch – another team in the league – and travelled around the world to play for Southern Stars, a lower-league team based on the outskirts of Melbourne, Australia.
Their arrival didn’t go unnoticed. Sportradar – a company hired to monitor and maintain the integrity of sports events – had suspicions. The players’ social media posts from Australia, featuring extravagant holidays in Bali and high-end nightclubs, only heightened them.
The Australian police were tipped off and the Southern Stars’ dressing room, clubhouse and even goalposts were rigged with hidden microphones.
Undercover officers posed as fans, phone calls were intercepted and bank transfers examined.
It led to a string of convictions, a clutch of leads and, ultimately, a sting operation by the National Crime Agency in south London.
By then, Swaibu could well have been out of the game, both legal and illegal.
He says he had saved up around £200,000 from fixing football.
And, at 24, playing football seemed to be over. Two short-term deals with Sutton and Whitehawk led nowhere.
“But I was addicted at this point, something was pulling me back in.”
One of Swaibu’s contacts had been tapped up by a new group of fixers – a gang trying to break into match-rigging and put together a network of players to pull it off.
Swaibu had his suspicions. The new fixers didn’t seem to know the rules. They seemed naive and inexperienced, with little idea of what was possible.
They dropped names of other match-fixers they had worked with, when discretion and secrecy were key to Swaibu’s previous bosses.
Some were also white, British and middle-aged, an unlikely profile for hi-tech gambling conspiracies, invariably leveraged from Asia.
Swaibu wanted to believe though. Because if they were new to fixing, they could be fleeced.
Swaibu says he took a photo of his local five-a-side team and told the fixers they were players in his pocket. He invited his new contacts to a League Two match between AFC Wimbledon and Dagenham and Redbridge and told them it was rigged. It would end, Swaibu said, in a 1-0 win for Wimbledon.
