As long as illegal sports betting exists on the sub-continent, and cricket matches stir punters' interests, there will be player approaches - particularly to opening batsmen, opening bowlers and captains as the best assets to control a spread betting market.
Human nature suggests if enough cricketers are approached, someone will be tempted to turn to the dark side, regardless of the preventative educational work completed by the likes of the New Zealand Cricket Players Association and the International Cricket Council's Anti-Corruption and Security Unit (ACSU), which starts with players appearing at the under-19 World Cup. The aim is to empower future elite level players so they are armed against those seeking to use them as a means to profit unscrupulously. Crooks groom cricketers young.
Conversely, despite cricket as a sport preparing players to apply patience and composure in the face of adversity, who would relish going through the rigmarole of a trial which can take years to prepare?
Chris Cairns talks to Newstalk ZB's Mike Hosking
Players would be loath to do so, given match-fixing's capacity to ruin lives regardless of innocence or guilt. Those involved could be left looking over their shoulders indefinitely should a spurned betting syndicate loom.
International cricketers banned or convicted of fixing involvement, such as Pakistanis Saleem Malik, Salman Butt, Mohammad Asif and Mohammad Amir, Indian Mohammad Azharuddin and New Zealand's Lou Vincent, must endure the consequences of their actions forever. Hansie Cronje suffered until his 2002 death in a plane crash.
Cricket also has less subtle ways of felling those involved in subterfuge.
On January 19, 2003, before the Cricket World Cup in South Africa, the match-fixing underworld flashed to the surface in one of the sport's ugliest moments. Ed Hawkins described the incident in his award-winning book 'Bookie, Gambler, Fixer, Spy', a fan's manual for how the Asian cricket betting underworld operates.
"The merrymakers didn't hear the gunshots," he wrote. "Twenty were fired, drowning the kisses of cue ball on colour in the snooker hall of the Indian Club ... Blood pumped from the skull of Sharad Shetty, darkening the green baize of the table to a dirty auburn. He had been shot from point-blank range by two men ... The killing had been ordered by Mumbai underworld boss Chhota Rajan. It was the culmination of an eight-year mafia war with his rival Dawood Ibrahim's infamous D-Company gang, of which Shetty was a deputy. In reprisals that could have been straight out of the Godfather trilogy, the adversaries had traded body bags: racketeers, goons, lieutenants."
As Hawkins explains it, Rajan was out to get revenge on Ibrahim, while also ensuring he could make a play for an illegal Indian betting market estimated at $1 billion ahead of the World Cup, in which Shetty had the dominant share.
The conclusion from the killing is that the match-fixing industry can make its participants vulnerable to such brutality. If you've got a faulty moral compass, you could be signing your death warrant, depending how far you sit up the match-fixing ladder. Cricketers tend to be on the lower rungs, but they can be leaned on.
The Cairns investigation was paraded as a vehicle to retaliate and demonstrate that players, like New Zealand captain Brendon McCullum, have nothing to fear if they have been stoic and forthright in the face of temptation. It has done anything but.
McCullum is normally a man brimming with joie de vivre, yet he was described by John Rhodes, the ACSU officer who took his evidence in three interviews between 2011 and 2014, as coming across as a "very nervous young man" who was "struggling in relation to his relationship to Chris Cairns".
Volunteering to co-operate with cricket corruption cases continues to hold minimal incentives.
