Jake Marsh had a dream once. Then he woke up. At the age of 14 he was on the books of Southend United. In the club canteen he ate lunch alongside Stan Collymore. For his school, Brentwood, he played in midfield with Frank Lampard. Up front was Neil Harris, who would score 156 career goals, the majority for Millwall. ‘When I played with those guys,’ he said, ‘I knew I wasn’t going to be good enough.’
Instead Marsh became an investigator, specialising in fraud and sport. He worked for Quest, a private investigations company owned by Lord Stevens, and was part of the team that conducted the inquiry into the Premier League transfer bung scandal – ‘you can call it bungs, I can’t’ – the Formula One race-fixing case in Singapore and an investigation into doping by the German showjumping team at the Beijing Olympics. Now he is the head of youth protection for the International Centre for Sport and Security (ICSS). His job is to help safeguard vulnerable young footballers. ‘I was one once,’ he said. ‘When I wanted to be a footballer, at age 13 or 14, had I got an email from an agent saying, “I can get you a trial at Arsenal or wherever,” I’m not sure how I would’ve reacted. Would I have fallen for it?’
He was talking about a scam which, to most people, would have so obviously appeared to be fraud that they would not have given it a second thought. It was not one of the two types of football trafficking, although it was inspired by it. Just like a young player might give money to an agent, who would then take them to a trial abroad only to abandon them when they failed, or pay an agent for a trial abroad, travel and then never hear from them again, the hoax relied on broken or false promises. It was important to understand its anatomy because it gave clues to how footballers could be exposed to genuine football trafficking and end up abandoned in a foreign city. It was crude but it showed succinctly how desperate young boys were to become stars in Europe.
‘It all starts with an email to a player,’ Marsh said. ‘That player, typically, is in Africa but it could be Spain, Portugal or South America. It says, “You’re a great player, we’ve got these four big clubs in Europe and they want to sign you, but first you need to fill in these forms and send some money so we can get your application up and running.”
‘You and me, we’re thinking about those emails that go round about winning the Nigerian lottery. But kids don’t think about that. They want it so badly that they fall for it. I’ve known kids hand over up to €3,000. To get to that point is quite detailed. There are email exchanges between agents and players of up to 50 or 60 threads. The scammers are probably talking to another 20 at the same time. They keep going and going, they hammer away. It’s not just one email. Think about it. It’s a 14-year-old on the other end, probably quite intimidated, naïve and unfortunately it appeals to their wishes and dreams in the sense they’ve finally got the break they’re looking for.’
In three years, Marsh had learnt the tricks of an unscrupulous trade. The lengths that the scammers, and those who had been scammed, would go to was extraordinary. There was the bank account set up in Stratford, east London, using the name Liverpool Football Club, which enticed thousands of pounds out of kids. ‘I heard about how, in one village in Africa, a family sold one of the younger kids to raise the money so the eldest could go on one of these trials. They would buy him back later when he [the elder brother] became a big star.’ Then there was the youngster who travelled to Manchester City’s training ground from Australia, wrongly believing an agent had used his money to get him a trial. ‘He turned up and said, “I’m here for my trial.” “Sorry, we’ve never heard of you.” He’d handed over a few grand. He was distraught. But he was lucky. City took pity on him, looked after him and put him on a flight home. Others aren’t so lucky.’
The scam was simple. The email addresses of the hopefuls were found using Facebook or YouTube, where kids, according to Marsh, ‘upload videos of themselves training every day’. There had also been a surge in attempts to defraud footballers on a website called Fieldoo, a football social media site. It offered the chance for footballers, agents and scouts to connect. Players could message agents asking for a trial, send videos and their CVs. It was a sort of football ‘dating’ site. Almost 150,000 registered users paid for membership costing as little as €9.99 a month.
It was while investigating how Fieldoo had been corrupted that Marsh discovered that the real names of agents were being used to trick players. It was identity theft. The scammers had simply used Fifa’s website to find licensed agents, where hundreds were listed per country, some with addresses, telephone numbers and email addresses. One of the names used was Cyrille Regis, the former England striker.
Money was requested, ranging from €300–€1,000, for medical insurance, registration fees, passports and visas. ‘Impossible for someone else to get a visa,’ Marsh said. ‘You have to apply in person or through a company which will need you to sign forms in person and provide a passport.’
The fraudsters were able to collect the money because of a flaw in the UK banking system. The payee name and account name on money transfers did not have to match, which enabled ‘agents’ to use names such as Liverpool FC and convince their targets everything was legitimate.
‘You or I could do it in half an hour, here and now,’ Marsh said. ‘It’s so simple. These people might have 30 or 40 kids on the go. They would only need four or five, paying €300 each, to come off to make big money.’
The email addresses had been traced to Lagos, Nigeria and the Ukraine. Fieldoo, which had passed information on to Fifa, claimed to have developed an algorithm to block suspected fraudsters. They also said that their website offered advice to players and agents in an effort to prevent the scam. However, articles in their ‘magazine’ section made no mention that users should not hand over money, and if they wanted to check whether an agent was legitimate, then they should simply look on Fifa’s website.
‘Unfortunately there’s no one who can do anything about it,’ Marsh said. ‘A Premier League club came to us and said, “Can you do something with this?” They had a whole file of cases. They were getting almost one a week telephoning or emailing them. We’ve spoken to clubs and federations, the Spanish, the English, the Dutch, among others to say, “Look this scam could happen to your players, please let them know.”’ At the time of writing the English FA had failed to pass on an official warning to clubs.
Disturbingly, Marsh believed that some of the scams originated from within football. ‘Compared to other online scams where you used to get someone saying “you’ve won ten million dollars” these are sophisticated. The English is very good, there are fake contracts which are 15 pages long, medical forms, visa registration forms, which I know aren’t real, but not everyone is going to know that. So the level of detail suggests they’ve either got contacts in the football industry or they’ve been operating frauds in the football industry at the same time. It’s just too much of coincidence.’
Joseph Kaltim wrote:
My very pleasure to write to this management, am a player from Nigeria. Please sir, I want to achieve my dreams, I want you to help me with my career by being my manager, I promise to give you my best. I look forward to hear from you sir.
Daniel Klog: hello, player . . .
Joseph Kaltim: Please sir be my agent
Daniel Klog: Thanks for your message i want you to know that i have read your CV and i like it and i want you to know that i will Forward your CV to the List of the Club Below:
1. Arsenal Fc (England)
2. Liverpool Fc Club (England)
3. Chelsea Fc (England)
4. Barnsley Fc (England)
5. South end Fc (England)
6. Manchester City Fc (England)
7. Reading Fc (England)
8. Queen park rangers Fc (England)
Joseph Kaltim: So what will I do sir?
Daniel Klog: SEND YOUR CV AND PASSPORT
Joseph Kaltim: Hello sir, hope you received it
Daniel Klog: I got your message. I am sorry for my late response. I just got back from the meeting with the listed club sponsors and after reviewing your CV, only QPR Football Club will like to have you for some 3 weeks trial. i never get any reply back from Other Club . . . I will be having some meeting with my sponsors tomorrow about you and some other boys that we are recruiting for these clubs and we want you to get prepared for the training and we want to see you put on your best performance at any of the club you choose to play with.
YOU HAVE TO MAKE YOUR REGISTRATION FEE THROUGH VIA MONEY GRAM OR WESTERN UNION MONEY TRANSFER
‘Klog’ had attached two forms, purporting to be official documents from Queens Park Rangers. They were slick. There was the club crest, address and telephone number. A watermark of the club badge had been added, running beneath professional-looking data and tick boxes for Joseph to fill in his name, address, date of birth, next of kin, next of kin telephone number, career details (including favourite position), former clubs and academy manager contact. A barcode had been added to the bottom of each page and on the first page there was a section to ‘affix passport photo here’.
Joseph did not fall for the scam. Eby Emenike, a London-based agent from Nigeria, told him not to pay any money. She forwarded me the above email exchange and had used it to warn players of the dangers of scams. In 2014 she had set up a charity called STAR (Stop Think Ask React), to educate young footballers in Ghana and Nigeria. Joseph was 16. ‘He’s desperate to come,’ Emenike said. ‘He calls me, he emails me, he’s sent thousands of messages. A lot of these boys think I can help them get a club. I can’t. They think I can be their mother. So he said to me, “I’m coming for a trial at QPR.” Initially I thought, “OK, let me know when it is and I’ll come to watch you.” Then I thought, “That doesn’t sound right.” I started asking questions about whether he had a visa, whether there was any money involved. Joseph doesn’t have any money, that’s for sure.
‘I don’t know about that QPR letter. I never got a response when I emailed the guy [Daniel Klog]. If I’d have wanted to take it further then I’d have gone to the FA. I don’t think it was fake, I called QPR and they said they were running trials.’
I called QPR, too. I thought they would be interested to receive information about their club being used for a possible fraud. They were not. When I spoke to their public relations department they told me not to bother sending through the forms which Joseph had received.
It was, undoubtedly, a fake. There were two mistakes. First there was the header ‘personal informations’. Then the question ‘wing of play?’. Both were examples, surely, that the author’s first language was not English. Then, of course, there was the biggest clue of all. Daniel Klog was listed on the Fifa website. His address was there – Cricklewood Lane, London – but there was no email address or telephone number. It was a case of stolen identity. The real Daniel Klog had been a victim.
It was something of a surprise that Joseph had not fallen for it. He was, as Emenike said, persistent. Several weeks before Joseph received the QPR ‘application’, Emenike had put me in touch with him. I had wanted to understand why he was so desperate to leave Nigeria and why he thought he was good enough to play professionally. It proved to be a mistake. He bombarded me with call after call, early morning and late at night. He sent countless emails. ‘Please dear, be my agent.’ ‘Just give me a chance.’ ‘I won’t let you down dearest, tell Eby to be my agent.’
‘I can’t be his agent!’ Eby laughed. ‘The first thing I said to him was, “Joseph, how are you going to get a work permit? You don’t play for the national team.” This is the big thing I publicise. If you don’t play for your national team you are not going to get a club in the UK, so if anyone promises you a club and you have no national caps you’re not going anywhere. You have to play 75 per cent of your national side’s matches over two years. There are some cases where if you’ve played 50 or 60 games then the club can fight for you. But you have to be a big star, a big prospect.
‘Most of the kids I speak to have no idea about that. It is worse when one actually falls for it and you tell them about work permits, or the underage thing, Article 19 – they can’t go if under 18. They cry. They’re embarrassed. They feel foolish. Some say they knew something was not right but they were too ashamed to say, or that they were worried that, if it was genuine, they would pass up the opportunity and one of their friends would get picked instead. That’s the other thing, they don’t talk to anyone outside the family about it until it’s too late.’
And yet the scam kept working. It was getting smarter. Eby showed me a contract offer from Emirates Club, the Arabian Gulf League team in the UAE. The basic salary was $1,500 a week for two years. Bonuses were to be negotiated. There were two lump sums of $1,200 and $1,350 payable to the player for medical cover and transportation.
‘The agent found the club and sent the salary package,’ Emenike said. ‘And he even said, “I don’t want to take any money but you’ll have to buy your own flight. You do it all. I’ll sort the accommodation for you. Just book your flight and when you’ve done that I can get your visa.” So the player thought, “This sounds good. They don’t want any money from me.” But the agent told him he had to book it with Emirates, that was one of the conditions. So he did it. But he said he tried to contact the agent and he wasn’t responding. There was something wrong. It didn’t feel right. So he went online to check his flight status and it said it had been refunded. So he contacted Emirates and they said, “Yeah, it’s been refunded into your bank account.” “But I paid cash. It hasn’t been refunded to me.” That’s a clever one. Not seen that before.’
There was no doubting the gravity of the ‘online scam’. Families had been bankrupted. In some parts of Africa, as Marsh said, kids had been charged up to €3,000, which was almost three times the annual salary. But when a child actually gets on a plane, flies to Europe, arrives at an airport and the ‘agent’ is nowhere to be seen, it is clear there are more serious frauds in operation. Families had been bankrupted by that, too.
‘Yeah, that’s the big problem. The actual trafficking,’ Marsh said. ‘It’s basically illegal movement of players, completely fraudulent. With the “online scam”, no one goes anywhere. It’s a simple con. It’s important to make clear the difference. But with trafficking, an “agent” will go to a club in, let’s say Africa, and approach a player or manager – he might already be working with a manager, having moved players before – and say to the player, “I’ve got an offer for you, a potential trial in Europe.” He talks to the parents, talks to the manager and he’ll try to get money out of the club or parents to pay for flights and accommodation in return for promising, “If I get him a club you’ll never have to worry about money again.” And then obviously he moves them to Europe where they can end up being dumped because they either don’t go to a club or they were never going to a club in the first place. The “agent” is using the person as a commodity to get the money out, get the kid over and then just leave them.’
According to Foot Solidaire and Jean-Claude Mbvoumin, that has happened to 7,000 African children since 2005. And all of them to France. ‘That’s the number I’ve heard him say,’ Marsh said. ‘I’ve met some of those kids, too, in Paris. They were all from Mali. They all had the same date of birth in their passports. That’s the other thing, you see, the visas and passports are illegally obtained. These people get visas from Ghana, Gambia, Zambia, these sorts of places, and people think they’re getting fake documents but they’re real documents illegally obtained. I heard of a story of a relative of an agent working in the embassy. The agent gets them to sort out the documents. It’s a real visa, they just don’t know the derivation of it and that’s the illegal part.’
It was clear that it was important to know how to get these ‘illegal’ passports and visas. They were essential tools for the trafficker because, without them, no player could go anywhere. Without them, football trafficking would be severely reduced.
‘A lot of people, when they hear about this problem, they say, “Oh, it’s not that bad,”’ Marsh said. ‘Well, in the last 18 months the more you look into it it’s a serious problem. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s at least maybe 2–3,000 youngsters a year who attempt to move or are targeted to move outside of Africa. They won’t just be going to Europe, they could be going to Asia as well. It could be upwards of that, I’m being quite conservative.
‘These are youngsters who are told they’ll have a future, and they’ve got no chance whatsoever but don’t know it. I would say that it’s at least 50–100 a year that are ending up in France under the guise of football when, in fact, the chances of them setting foot on a pitch are incredibly slim.’
It begged the question, if they weren’t travelling for football purposes, then what? ‘We think we’ve got criminals doing it and moving them into drugs, prostitution,’ Marsh said. ‘Do we have football people doing it? Wouldn’t surprise me. The governance in African football is almost non-existent. Anything goes. But of all the work I’ve done in sport, this is the hardest. It’s impossible. I can trace computer IP addresses, money flow from bank accounts, but people? These kids are getting picked up and moved from remote parts of Africa. How do you track that? Then they end up in Europe and they just disappear. They vanish. Absolutely impossible.’
The only man who could find them, seemingly, was Jean-Claude Mbvoumin. ‘If I was being honest,’ Marsh said, ‘Foot Solidaire do need to be seen to be transparent, and it needs to be clear what they’re doing. When I speak to people about them they will often say they don’t understand exactly what they’re doing.’
Emenike said that Jean-Claude was ‘looking at the cure’. She didn’t know why children were being moved out of Africa once agents had the money in their pocket and were fully aware that they couldn’t get them a club. ‘I have no idea what’s going on there,’ she said. ‘It’s always puzzled me. Some of them are not dumped instantly. They trial them in clubs and then realise they can’t do anything with them. The guys that take them are unscrupulous. It’s a business and they just don’t care about the family or the boy. That’s difficult to get to the bottom of.’
‘Impossible’. ‘Difficult’. Maybe. But it was vital to track down the people who were moving kids from one continent to the other. Now I understood more about the methods, I could put a plan into action.