This may not be cricket, but it's pretty funny

What I know about cricket is...not much.

Like baseball, cricket has innings and bats. And cricket may (or may not) be a baseball antecedent.

I've seen in played on Downton Abbey. 

And read about it in the Lord Peter Wimsey books by Dorothy Sayers, as Lord Peter was an excellent cricketeer. (And just learned that Jeeves, the butler in P.G. Wodehouse's brilliant

and hilarious Jeeves and Wooster stories, was named after British cricket great Percy Jeeves, who was killed in WWI. That's Percy to the right.)

Players wear white flannel. (Or they did on Downton Abbey. Or if they were Percy Jeeves.) And shin pads. 

I know there are cricket-related expressions. Like sticky wicket. And not being cricket. 

I know it's played in England, and in places that Britannia ruled when ruling Britannia was a thing. Places like Pakistan and India. 

And it was in India that a group ran a fake cricket tournament - and scammed some Russian punters into betting on the matches. 

A group of Indian farmers set up a fake Indian Premier League (IPL) cricket tournament so convincing that they managed to trick a Russian audience into making real bets. According to a report from the Times of India, the fake games took place on a farm in the village of Gujarat, with 21 farm laborers and unemployed teens who were each paid 400 rupees (~$5 USD) and tasked with impersonating “pro” cricket players from well-known Indian teams. (Source: The Verge)

The fake matches were livestreamed on YouTube, and to make them more realistic, the scammers used sound effects and a commentator who sounded like a pro. (Reminds me of reading about the early days of radio broadcasts of baseball games, where the announcer - who was nowhere near the ballfield - would follow along with notes slipped to him by a telegrapher relaying the game action coming in via Morse Code. The games would include sound effects like the crack of the bat. One of these early announcers was none other than Ronald Reagan.)

The scam was pretty elaborate.

Shoeb Davda, one of the masterminds behind the phony tournament, fed instructions to the umpire based on the live bets they received from the Russians. The umpire would then make a signal to the batsman and bowler to steer bets in their favor.  

Shades of the Chicago White Sox! Shades of point-shaving scandal(s)!  

The scammers managed to collect 300,000 rupees before they were shutdown. That's a bit less than $4K in US dollars. Not a lot of money, until you consider that the average Indian farm laborer makes about 300 rupees a month, or about four bucks. So getting paid 400 rupees to pretend you're a player on the Chennai Super Kings, Mumbai Indians and Gujarat Titans for an hour or so is a pretty big deal.

Not quite sure from the write-ups I saw who was behind the scam. More likely a gang than a bunch of farmers; most likely the brainchild of a "Russia-based mastermind."

This may not be cricket - and I sure hope that the farm laborers and unemployed kids don't end up in some Indian hoosegow for the role they played (which I can only imagine would be a hellhole) - but the idea of a bunch of Russian bettors getting conned by a fake cricket scam is pretty funny. 

Caveat, bettors! Gotta watch out for sticky wickets. They're everywhere.