Taking the immorality of all of this away for a second, you can't help but marvel a little bit at this. I don't know that "fixing sports betting with minimal hassle from the authorities" could get much more optimized than this. Consider ...

(a) It's a sport[0] that, while popular enough, isn't, well,... popular enough for its spectators/gamblers to make up enough of the electorate to draw the necessary attention.

(b) If I'm understanding things correctly, it's not "huge games" they're talking about. There's a "subset" of "a" that care about this.

Taken together, those two minimize the interest in the sport (perhaps the minor leagues ... of hockey ... in Texas?)[1]

(c) From what it appears, the players (the most important part of the equation, I'd imagine) don't get jail time. Therefore, it's a matter of finding a reasonable number of "the right kind of player" -- someone who's aging out of the sport, who's (minimal) success was such that the "cost of their reputation" was affordable to organized crime. Someone who's realistic next step in the career ladder was going to be "teaching tennis to children", soon, anyway.

(d) That person is also, likely disenfranchised with the sport and is likely easy to gain loyalty from. And, of course, their celebrity is such that a player "gaining a conscience" would simultaneously remember their mortality.

On the financial side, it's a matter of decentralizing some of the "people who create accounts on betting sites", "people who place bets", and "people who transfer money" down to minimal assignments per person -- the various "mules" end up making up a large part of the actual crime being committed. It has to make prosecuting something like this incredibly tedious. If "the organization" behind this could recruit enough people, their exposure to "committing an actual crime" might end up being so minimal that there's not incentive enough to get them to give up higher rungs in the organization[2]. It would require a sophisticated investigator, but it because of (a), above, it's difficult to find that investigator.

There's not a lot of incentive for the betting outfits to take simple steps like "disallow betting on matches of minimal significance" or taking really any steps to solving this problem. Besides the fact that many are already operating on the fringes of legality and I wouldn't be shocked if all were run by questionable/criminal outfits/individuals, the article makes it sound like "these low level players/low level games" are optimal to the criminals. I'd imagine there's fear about encouraging the criminals to move up to more important matches.

[0] It hurts to say it as it was one of the few that I played well and the few I enjoyed watching.

[1] I can hear someone saying "in X country, and all countries combined, has more followers than GOD!" or something like that. I'll save you the trouble and both concede that "if you're right, I wouldn't know anyway" and that ... maybe minor league hockey really is popular in Waco ... or something. Neither was my point; only that "the people who do care", for whatever reason, don't represent a loud enough voice (or a voice the authorities care enough about) to be useful.

[2] Especially against the usual "snitches get stitches" tactics.