Lithuanian 'Fake' League Team Busted After One Match in 2025 Fixing Scandal

Last summer, the Rift Legends league in Lithuania stumbled into a scandal that still sends ripples through the European esports scene a year later. A supposed professional League of Legends team named MY STAR took the stage for the 2025 Summer Split, only to crumble like a sandcastle under the first wave. I’ve been covering tier-two leagues long enough to know that financial pressures can warp incentives, but what happened next was so clumsy it resembled a bad magician attempting to vanish an elephant using a handkerchief.

A sudden roster purge and a trail of red flags

Ahead of the split, MY STAR dropped its entire lineup and signed a fresh set of faces almost overnight. None of the former players had future plans lined up, and the new roster included last-minute substitutes to skirt regional player restrictions. That alone might raise an eyebrow, but the real fireworks began the moment the Nexus spawned. In their debut series, the team looked less like a coordinated unit and more like five strangers dropped into a battle royale with their monitors unplugged.

The laning phase was catastrophic. One player, competing under the name Balukos, died five times before the ten-minute mark. It was a performance so disastrous that it triggered automated alerts on betting platforms—many of which allow wagers on individual player statistics like lane deaths. Investigators later noted that this could have been the point: a deliberate feeding to cash in on micro-bets. The entire match felt like watching a clockwork toy wound in reverse, each gear spinning futilely against its purpose.

Ghosts in the webcam and the silent team

What truly exposed the farce was the player webcams. Throughout both matches, the participants stared blankly ahead, their expressions as unchanging as a wax museum exhibit. No one uttered a word—no callouts, no celebrations, no frustration. In any legitimate pro environment, silence of that magnitude is about as common as a snowstorm in the Sahara.

Then came the identity puzzle. The camera labeled for Balukos appeared to show a player named Lesterik, a former main roster member who had been moved to “substitute.” Official records listed Balukos as Luka Glisic, while Lesterik is Danijel Šego. The discrepancy was either a brutal administrative error or a clumsy attempt to loop old footage while the “real” team played elsewhere. Only one player, Ruf, had visible proof of active participation: the champion select reflected clearly in his glasses. Yet even he spent most of the game typing furiously on a second monitor, likely communicating with unseen teammates.

The whole charade had the structural integrity of a house of cards built in a wind tunnel.

A history of suspicion and a swift ban

Further digging revealed that two of the listed players, kory and LakatosD (competing as SZLOBESZKOV in Counter-Strike), had previously been accused of match-fixing in CS. While those allegations were never proven, their presence on a team that immediately self-destructed was the final straw. Rift Legends officials acted with uncharacteristic haste, booting the entire organization from the league effective immediately for breaching multiple conduct rules.

This incident is part of a grim pattern across tier-two esports. In China, a single investigation banned almost forty players for similar offenses, and Valorant’s lower divisions have been rattled by betting rings worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. The economic reality is simple: running a competitive roster is expensive, and when revenue streams shrink, the temptation to treat every game as a slot machine grows. Riot Games itself acknowledged the strain by exempting LCS franchises from maintaining mandatory academy rosters. For smaller leagues like Rift Legends, the margins are even thinner, turning match-fixing from a scandal into almost an expected rent.

Where things stand in 2026

A year later, the fallout continues. Rift Legends forwarded its findings directly to Riot Games, and sources indicate legal action against MY STAR’s ownership is still on the table for damaging the league’s reputation. Local fans, led by community sleuths like Reddit user dudanced, have kept the conversation alive, compiling timelines and evidence that make this one of the most brazen exposes in recent memory.

The MY STAR debacle serves as both a cautionary tale and a bizarre time capsule. It reminds us that in the digital colosseum, the line between competition and con artistry can be as thin as a blade of grass—and sometimes the cheaters don’t even bother to hide the shears.