Ekaterina Bychkova has been fined $5,000 and suspended for 30 days for not telling tennis officials that she had been approached to fix a match, the WTA announced on Friday.
Rules established by the Tennis Integrity Unit in 2007 require any player who is approached to fix a match to report the incident within 48 hours.
An independent hearing officer found "no evidence that Ms. Bychkova contrived or accepted any compensation to contrive the outcome or any other aspect of a tennis match" "is deemed to have committed an offense under the Uniform Tennis Anti-Corruption Programme by failing to report the proposal."
Last May, the Wall Street Journal ran a feature story on gambling and reports of match-fixing in tennis that included an account of one gambler's attempt to contact players about pre-arranging matches.
"[The gambler] discovered Ms. Bychkova, another Russian player coached by her mother, kept a diary on Livejournal.com," said the story. "He thought she might be interested in making some extra money -- in one blog entry she waxed poetic about a Louis Vuitton purse. In February, after registering for the site, he sent her a match-fixing proposal through a private message.
Both [the gambler] and Ms. Bychkova say Ms. Bychkova declined the proposal. She says she didn't tell anyone, including tennis officials, because she thought it would 'sound really funny' to report someone she'd never met who contacted her through her blog. 'I don't want to fix matches and will never do it,' says Ms. Bychkova."