BENGALURU: A delivery boy, who posed as a bookie and tried luring a former Indian Premier League (IPL) cricketer with Rs 40 lakh to fix a match with an intention to extort him, has been arrested by the Jayanagar police. The accused Anand Kumar worked as a delivery boy with a private firm in Chikkalasandra.
Rajagopal Sathish, who had played for Kolkata Knight Riders in the IPL, is a Ranji player and is currently playing for Chepauk Super Gillies in Tamil Nadu Premier League (TNPL). Sathish allegedly received a text message on Instagram on January 3 and the sender with user ID Bunny_Anand had offered to pay Rs 40 lakh if Sathish agreed to indulge in match-fixing.
He had also claimed he had approached other players to fix the TNPL matches and two of them had agreed. However, Sathish had cut the conversation. "The player (Sathish) had brought the matter to the notice of the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI), who lodged a police complaint on January 14. Based on their complaint, the person who had sent the message was traced and arrested. During the inquiry, it was found that the accused had borrowed hand loan to the tune of Rs. 4-5 lakh but was unable to repay them," the police said.
The accused, who watched a video on YouTube about how to extort cricketers, decided to send messages to cricket players. "He planned to offer them a huge amount of money to fix a match through messages. If they accepted the offer, he intended to take the screenshot and later blackmail them for money threatening to share the conversation on social media," the police said, adding that he had sent similar messages to Antony Dhas, Sanjay Yadav, Aswin Crist, K Mani Bharathi, and Siddharth Manimaran, all five Tamil Nadu cricketers but none accepted his offer.