MELBOURNE, Australia — I was walking to my neighborhood Starbucks one morning last year when I received a Facebook message request from “Ben Rotenberg.”
“Hello mr Ben,” the sender began, “are you interesting information about fixed match? I be write in Russian.”
I was certainly interested in learning more about this figure who had created a Facebook account in (almost) my name for the sole purpose of contacting me, so we switched to Russian.
Tediously translating his messages and then my responses, we began to talk. He said he had read an article I had written months earlier about match fixing in tennis and the case of a first-round match at a small tournament in Dallas that had been flagged for suspicious betting patterns and volume.