League of Legends Player Attempted Suicide Leads To Investigation And Lawsuit

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A Korean League of Legends Player, Cheon “Promise” Min-ki attempted suicide after a sponsorship scam last week. Promise survived a 12-story leap from a building and was hospitalized in critical condition. The incident led to a KeSPA (Korean e-Sports Association) investigation on the team coach. But first, let’s explain why the attempted suicide occurred.


League of Legends team AHQ Korea has a sponsorship with AHQ. The team coach, Mr. Noh, told the team that they were sponsored by AHQ with cash, computers, housing, living expenses, and salaries. However, this was a lie; AHQ only gave them gaming gear to give them right to the team name and everything else was paid for by Mr. Noh who took out a loan to pay the team members. He anticipated fixing matches and placing illegal bets on them to turn a profit to pay off his loan debts. He approached several team members to fix the matches, but the two that were supposed to throw the matches were Promise and Actscene.

Mr. Noh told team members that he would take 50% of all prize money to “pay dues” to AHQ which was actually going towards paying his loan debts. When the team confronted him about this, he refused to confirm or deny the lie, then proceeded to sell their computers, have their utilities turned off, and ask them to leave the house.

The fixed games and having a false sponsor was more than he could bear; it was then he decided to try to end it all. He posted his suicide note on his Facebook page (the translation can be read here) and stated that 5 minutes after that posting he’d be “gone” – fate had a different plan for him, however.

This led to an investigation into what exactly happened, and it turns out that while Actscene agreed to throw the matches, he didn’t pull it off; it was mostly Promise who went along with the plan.

KeSPA gathered testimony from the other team members (Casper, Hoon, Trace, and Actscene) were used to corroborate Promise’s story about the matches being fixed. It was found that most of what Promise wrote was true, but some of it was false (they believe he was either mistaken or wrong about it).

The falsehoods in the note were as follows:

  • No one except for Actscene knew that Mr. Noh wanted to throw the games
  • Actscene and Promise followed through with throwing the games (Actscene didn’t execute the plan)
  • Mr. Noh told them to give first blood to the opposing team in the matches between KTB and CJF every time. Some matches, AHQ got first blood.

After reviewing tapes and testimony from the other team members, it was confirmed that Actscene did not take part in throwing the games and KeSPA has filed a lawsuit against Mr. Noh for mistreating and threatening team members. They are also launching an investigation to make sure no other team coaches are doing the same to their team members.

(Source: Reddit)