Pro LoL coach wanted by police for “fraud and computer misuse”

A professional League of Legends coach is wanted by North Yorkshire Police in England over a series of fraud and computer misuse offenses dating back to 2014.

Turkish League coach Aykut ‘Turkinator’ Baskal has helped lead some of Turkey’s best teams onto the world stage, but he is now being chased down by British police.

The former coach of 1907 Fenerbahçe is wanted over “fraud and computer misuse” charges, dating back to 2014.

According to a report by the BBC, Turkinator is wanted over “a series of frauds which took place between January 2014 and December 2015.” He had also missed a previous court appearance in August 2017.

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The police believe he is currently in Turkey since the TCL season has just wrapped up, but he has ties to people in the United Kingdom.

Turkinator was the coach of 1907 Fenerbahçe Esports from November 2018 to August 2019, and has coached other Turkish League of Legends teams since 2017. He was released by the organisation on August 26 when his contract expired.

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He has worked alongside players like Park ‘Untara’ Ui-jin, formerly of SK Telecom T1, as well as Misfits’ Thomas ‘Kirei’ Yuen. He helped Fenerbahçe qualify for MSI 2019, where the team then failed to make it out of play-ins after going 4-2 in the round robin.

He is notorious in the Turkish League of Legends community for allegedly drop hacking and DDOSing high elo games, as well as being generally toxic to other players.

However, the announcement of him being a wanted criminal has shocked members of the League community in Europe. 

Timotej ‘Zen’ Štempihar, who worked with Turkinator as a coach at Fenerbahçe, said that “I disagreed with him on many things while I was in Turkey, but I never would have guessed he was actually wanted by the British Police and is a suspected criminal.”

1907 Fenerbahce failed to qualify for Worlds 2019 after making it to MSI earlier this year. 

The team fell to their worst performance in history with a sixth place finish in TCL 2019 Summer, with the Turkish slot at Worlds going over to Royal Youth.