ESIC closes the SENZA case with six sanctions and a US$20,000 penalty

A Counter-Strike 2 organization has been told to pay US$20,000 to a charity before it may enter another tournament run by a member of the Esports Integrity Commission. The commission, known as ESIC, published the outcome of its investigation into Team SENZA on April 30, 2026. Alongside the penalty on the organization, it sanctions six players of the team's former roster: one for two years, on a finding of account sharing, and five for twelve months each, because they did not answer the investigators.

The case goes back to two matches of June 2025 in a European online qualifier. It ends without any finding on the heaviest suspicions that opened it, and ESIC explains why: most of the people it questioned gave it nothing to work with.

Esports Integrity Commission, sanction outcome published on April 30, 2026.

What ESIC decided

The outcome concerns participants and entities connected to Team SENZA, a roster that the commission says was also known as -72c and as ROSY. It contains three kinds of decision, which ESIC calls Rejection Orders for the players and a penalty for the team. The page does not define a Rejection Order; it gives each one a first and a last day.

For one of the five, the twelve months come on top of something else. A week earlier, ESIC had given timeagento a separate five-year sanction. The outcome of April 30 says the two run cumulatively, and it gives the combined period: from March 20, 2025 to 11:59 pm GMT on March 19, 2031, which makes six years.

The page states no route of appeal and reports no public response from the players or from the organization.

One account, more than one player

The only finding on the substance concerns the player registered as byek. ESIC found that he engaged in account sharing or identity-related cheating during official competition. In plain terms, the commission concluded that the account playing under that name was not always in the same hands.

It bases this on two things. The first is what it observed: unexplained irregularities in performance and in connection, which it reads as signs of possible hand-offs of the account in the middle of a series. From these it concludes that another individual may have played on the account, so that the person competing was not the person registered. The second is a document: the finding was corroborated, ESIC writes, by an express written admission from the team's ownership.

The commission treats the matter as a serious violation. Its reasoning is that integrity rules require the registered competitor to be the participant who actually plays. Among the six players, byek is also the only one ESIC credits with having supplied anything, and it calls that information limited.

Five sanctions for silence

The other five orders rest on procedure alone. ESIC says it sent formal requests for information to the participants concerned, including interrogatories, which are written questions to be answered formally, and instructions to preserve evidence. Most of them did not respond or did not provide what was required.

The consequence is stated openly. Without that material, ESIC could not obtain the player-level evidence it needed to resolve the broader concerns it had about the roster. The twelve-month orders punish the refusal to answer, and the commission takes care to say what they are not.

The duty behind these orders is written in ESIC's Anti-Corruption Code. Article 4.3 allows the commission to issue a written demand for information, records or an interview, and requires the participant to cooperate fully within the period ESIC sets. The outcome itself does not quote the article.

A penalty paid to charity

The organization is sanctioned on the same ground as the five players. According to ESIC, Team SENZA gave no proper answers to the interrogatories, did not produce the materials requested, and did not preserve or supply relevant evidence. The commission lists what that evidence concerned: the identity of the people on the roster, devices, communications, and the team's own internal investigation, which it says was never produced. In ESIC's assessment, this conduct materially hindered its work.

The US$20,000 does not go to the commission. It must be paid in full as a donation to a charity that the team nominates and ESIC approves. The outcome sets no deadline. It sets a condition instead: the organization cannot resume participation in ESIC member events until satisfactory proof of payment has been provided and accepted.

The code leaves room for a measure of this kind. Its Article 6.2, which sets the range of sanctions for each offense, adds that fines may be imposed at any level the decision-maker finds appropriate.

From two June matches to an April ruling

ESIC places the case in CCT Season 3 Europe, a series of online tournaments, and says it identified integrity concerns about matches played on June 6 and June 8, 2025. HLTV, which reported the outcome on April 30, names them. Both belong to the closed qualifier of the circuit's Europe Series 3, the qualifying round that precedes the main tournament, and the team played both as -72c. It lost 0-2 to HEROIC Academy on June 6 and 0-2 to CPH Wolves on June 8.

The first public step came from the organization, not from ESIC. In early September 2025, HLTV reported at the time, SENZA announced its own investigation into byek over allegations of account sharing, said it had fined him around US$30,000 and removed him from the roster. In late September it parted ways with the rest of the squad, and on October 3 it presented a new lineup.

At the time, HLTV wrote, the team had been playing lower-tier online competitions in Europe, among them CCT events, Exort The Proving Grounds and European Pro League.

A week after the new lineup was presented, the commission stepped in. On October 10, 2025, ESIC announced an interim suspension of the rostered players, coaches and staff of SENZA while it investigated alleged breaches of its Anti-Corruption Code and Code of Conduct, with three areas named: possible use of outside information, betting misconduct and account irregularities. Esports Insider, quoting ESIC's release, reported that the measure applied to all ESIC member events and to any tournament adopting the commission's integrity program, and that ESIC had specified that its investigation concerned the roster dropped in September.

Of those three areas, the outcome published 202 days later rules on one. Account irregularities led to the two-year order. On outside information and on betting, the page records no finding.

The orders also start on April 7, 2026, not on the day of the interim suspension. The outcome does not explain the choice of that date.

The interim measure itself has a basis in the code. Article 4.7 provides for a provisional suspension when a charge is brought, or in exceptional circumstances in which the integrity of a game, a match or an event could otherwise be seriously undermined. A participant suspended in this way may apply to have the measure lifted if no full hearing has taken place within three months.

The decision of the week before

The SENZA outcome is the second ESIC publication in a week to name timeagento. In an outcome dated April 23, 2026, the commission sanctioned four Counter-Strike participants for the use of prohibited cheating software, involvement in match manipulation, or both. One of them, zLy, was barred for life; ESIC cited the severity of the conduct, his formal admission of guilt and a request for a permanent ban. The three others, propleh, Ruler and timeagento, each received five years. For timeagento, ESIC wrote that the sanction followed an effective admission of guilt, given in an unqualified response to the Notice of Charge. HLTV, reporting the decision the same day, described the conduct as spread across several teams and competitions.

HLTV counted the April 23 decision as ESIC's third outcome of the month, after a four-year sanction for match manipulation published on April 1 and a lifetime ban for an assault on stage at the CAGGTUS Leipzig LAN party. The end of April was a dense period for the commission. Its list of sanction outcomes shows seven entries dated between April 21 and April 30, 2026, the SENZA decision being the last of them.

What the orders mean in practice

ESIC's sanctions are applied by its members. Under Article 9.1 of the Anti-Corruption Code, members recognize, enforce and give effect to the commission's decisions and sanctions within their own competitions, without further formality.

For the six players, that closes ESIC member events for the length of each order: until April 6, 2027 for four of them, until April 6, 2028 for byek, and until March 19, 2031 for timeagento once his two sanctions are added together.

For the organization, the way back is the one the outcome describes, and it has no calendar. The lineup SENZA presented in October 2025 is not the one ESIC investigated, but the penalty is addressed to the organization itself. Until the donation is made and the proof accepted, it cannot return to an ESIC member event.

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