YouTubers admit rigging, illegal promotion of CSGO gambling

Recently we reported that Valve are being sued by a player over alledgedly allowing for enabling illegal gambling with the skins players get from crates in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CSGO).

Players buy crates containing various skins of varying rarity. While common skins are pretty much worthless, the more rare ones are valued at thousands of dollars. Players are encouraged to trade these, and Valve has made it possible so that external sites can allow for these skins to be use in betting. Essentially these skin gambling sites let you put your stack of skins against another player's stack of skins, a coin toss (virtual one), then decides who walks away with all the skins. As these skins can then be sold off for actual money, there is a case to be made that this constitutes illegal gambling. And gambling that's open to minors.

Bloomberg reported that the valued of the skins exchanged on these sites reached $2.3 billion with 3 million skin gamblers. A staggering number, and as you'd expect the sites themselves retain a cut for the house on these transactions.

Whenever a grey market, or an unregulated gambling opportunity arises, there will be people to take advantage, and reports of scams have emerged as a result. Who's to know if the game isn't rigged without any oversight or control?

A few days ago some investigative journalism by YouTuber HonortheCall (followed up by H3H3) unearthed some frankly disgusting ties between a couple of popular Youtubers and one of these gambling sites. ProSyndicate and TmarTn, with a combined subscriber count of around 10 million on their various YouTube channels, had been putting up videos of them winning big (and sometimes losing) on a CSGO skins gambling site called CSGOLotto.

Now, they would hardly be the first people to endorse something on YouTube without disclosing they were being paid to do so, but that's not the case here. Instead CSGOLotto is a site they jointly own and operate. With access to the backend of the site they could easily manipulate the outcomes and fake the whole thing. No disclaimers were put on these videos originally, although these have now been added. ProSyndicate was caught up in a similar affair last year when he used videos to promote a game he held equity in (Dead Realm) without disclosing this to the viewers.

Both TmarTn and ProSyndicate have offered multiple explanations and apologies across various channels, with some of TmarTn's explanations contradicting each other. Did he not own the site when he posted a certain video? Did he actually found the company as the paper work indicates and he claims elsewhere?

Whether they will come under legal fire remains to be seen, but it would appear to be a clearcut case of breaking the FCC guidelines. It seems Steam has suspended the CSGOLotto from being able to connect with the game for the time being.

In a related revelation, PsiSyndicate (not to be confused with ProSyndicate aka Syndicate), a popular YouTuber with just under half a million subscribers who mainly rose to fame playing Arma III and DayZ admitted to partaking in rigging a CSGO lottery video.

"The idea was brought to me by Steamloto, they proposes (sic) rigging, in return for a Dragon Lore, I just fell right into it. The total takings was $3200 in skins, Dragon Lore/Ruby, $1200 ($4000 really, $2800 of my own skins) of which I gave away. So in the end I gained nothing but views XD, and lost some skins, but it's lying that is important here."

PsiSyndicate monetised the video with over 1.5 million views, so to say he gained nothing is clearly not the truth. But coming clean does at least offer some redemption, and a bit of insight into the shady dealings of these gambling sites.

We expect the fallout of this to continue, but clearly the courtcase that Valve is facing is key here. And Valve are not helped by the fact that these truths are coming to light.