South Australian soccer must be vigilant of match fixing, according to crime expert South Australian authorities have been warned about match fixing. SOUTH Australian soccer authorities must be vigilant for signs of match fixing, according to an international expert on organised crime. Declan Hill, who specialises in the study of organised crime and international issues, has warned that South Australia's time zone was perfect for a billion online gamblers in Asia. The Canadian-based journalist broke the story of match-fixing gangs destroying international soccer in his book The Fix: Soccer & Organized Crime. Hill has been a keynote speaker at Canberra's Australian and New Zealand Sports Lawyers Association, the International Olympic Committee, the Council of Europe, the Lexis-Nexis Global Economic Crime Summit, the World Lottery Association and the International Fraud Investigators Conference. Hill has risked his life to uncover illegal match-fixing activity which threatens to tear the very fabric of soccer apart. The Advertiser talked to Hill last week after Australian soccer was rocked when it was discovered some members of Southern Stars were allegedly fixing matches in the Victorian Premier League this year. He said SA soccer was not immune from match fixing. It is understood that no soccer matches in SA are currently under investigation by the authorities but Hill says the game's keepers must be vigilant at all times. Victoria's Southern Stars club was allegedly infiltrated by foreign players and officials who were skilled enough to swing results illegally at will. Hill said he believed Australian soccer's second, third and even junior leagues would continually be targeted by match fixing organised criminals given SA and Australia's time zone matches peak traffic for prolific gamblers across Asia. In addition, the relatively limited publicity of those games makes them easier targets to fix, he said. "What has been described there in Australia is a classic match fixing fraud," Hill said. That is where you need to lift your imagination up because you think you know about match fixing but it's obviously much bigger there. Here's the paradigm that we see around the world, it's sports and officials that are making money by importing players that are brought into a league commanding them to win or lose. Hill said Asian betting syndicates - legal and illegal - had fallen in love with betting on Australian soccer mainly because of the time zone. He believed AFL was unlikely to be targeted by match fixing criminals because the sport did not have much appeal to gamblers outside of Australia. But it doesn't mean Australian football is immune, he added. "Friday at eight o'clock and up in Beijing and Hong Kong comes up an Australian soccer game on TV and they think 'hey, let's have a punt'," Hill said. So what that means is that the strength of the Asian gambling market is so large. There's so much liquidity, cash flowing into all these tiny games. It is pretty shocking. Hill said match fixing was hard to perfect but recruiting players and officials for the scam was easy enough. "You can't get enough money to do the spot fix in football," he said. It's basically score goals and half-time and full-time. You can get up to 30 times your money back on that. But Hill also said a lot of fixed matches did not reward criminals because results have gone wrong during tarnished clashes. "Football is a difficult game to fix but the rewards for fixing it are so hot for the people getting paid," he said. The thing about these guys they're not like the Cosa Nostra (Mafia), they're not mobsters, they're brokers. Many of these guys are thoroughly honest criminals, if they make a deal with you they'll pay you.