By Tom Parsons
December 17 – Twitter accounts predicting the outcomes of several high-profile football draws, leading some to conclude that those in charge of the draws are corrupt, have turned out to be a scam to build twitter audiences for these newly created and so-called ‘ITK’ (in the know) accounts.
@uefacorruption was set up 24 hours prior to the last 16 of the Champions League draw and gives the impression that they successfully foresaw the ties that would emerge following the drawing of the remaining 16 teams left in Europe’s elite club competition.
The account’s first Tweets include: “Through our twitter account we are going to reveal a portion of UEFA’s corruption and manipulation”, and “Corruption that is led by people from behind the scenes. For economical reasons that are harming the sport”.
The account then proceeded to list the eight matches that they suggest would be corruptly drawn at the live draw in Nyon the following day. All eight ties were correct and left people wondering if there was more to this account than meets the eye.
The Twitter account then gained over 8,000 followers in the hour following the draw with many famous followers, including player turned broadcaster Matt Le Tissier, interested in how the account managed to seemingly predict the correct draw, and whether there is indeed corruption with the way these draws take place.
The truth about these accounts is that they have zero followers until the draw is announced because the people running these accounts don’t want anyone to see the Tweets until after the draw.
The accounts are created and then tweet every possible outcome that the draw can bring, before deleting the ties that don’t come out the hat, leaving just the eight games that are due to be played. They then retweet the Tweets on other accounts making it look like a fix.
This also happened the World Cup group draws as @FraudeMundial14 tweeted the groups a day before the draw took place. That account suggested FIFA had fixed the groups before the ceremony took place. That account now has 32,000 followers, with one of its tweets being retweeted 13,000 times.
Why do they do it? Everyone wants Twitter accounts with thousands of followers, and this way cheats the system. They can then have a small football audience, change their name and people forget about this in the future. It happens more regularly than you think.
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