Twitch’s online gambling problem: $400,000 scammed
By Josh Foreman
taken from Flickr.com
How do you use the internet? For most, it’s a safe place to share their thoughts, feelings and creations with friends, family and strangers alike. Others use it as a means of watching personalities, celebrities and events that they can only dream of attending. Below all else are the people who use the internet to lie, cheat, and steal from others. Because they’re all online, it’s okay, right?
One of the biggest public cases of online scamming was recently uncovered. The beginning of September was met with a streamer known as “ItsSliker,” or simply Sliker, being accused of stealing nearly $400,000 from other streamers. Among his own community, built through years of streaming games such as “Counter-Strike: Global Offensive,” and other, more prominent, mainstream communities on the platform, people were being lied to and extorted out of large sums of money to fuel Sliker’s pronounced gambling addiction.
On Sept.18, Twitch live-streamer Lupeli announced the discovery of a major, life-changing scam to which she fell victim. She was coerced into transferring nearly $15,000 to Sliker, despite currently undergoing chemotherapy, to help him pay bills due to a “frozen bank account,” which turned out to be feeding his addiction. After a conversation with her roommate, fellow streamer MiniTitan, about Sliker’s alleged debt, she discovered that her roommate had a similar interaction but with a suspiciously different story.
“He’d asked me for £5k in the video, crying, swearing on the Quran, on his parents, that he’d pay me back, but then he’s asked MiniTitan, who doesn’t have as much money, for £300,” said Lupeli during an interview with Youtube news channel Coffeezilla.
Because of the shift in stories between the two, it was apparent that Sliker was giving false reasons for his reckless habit. Almost immediately after Lupeli’s exposé, dozens of other content creators came out of the woodwork with their own experiences. All were unique enough to allow this scam to continue as long as it did, yet still different enough put a hole in the story.
Sliker is a prime example of the negative effects that addiction can entail, causing him to steal hundreds of thousands of dollars from the people he called friends. This entire situation, ultimately caused by online gambling, led to a reconsideration of the same type of content that was previously dominating Twitch, raking in millions of dollars for some of the biggest streamers on the platform. In the days following Sliker’s outing, many people were considering the negative implications that gambling has online, affecting the victims and bystanders just as much as the gamblers themselves. Since this push toward banning gambling on Twitch, the company has since banned it from the platform entirely, despite letting Sliker stay (but voiding his contract). Streamers Ludwig and xQc have generously teamed up to repay all of the money lost from this fiasco, joining the movement to ban gambling on Twitch and righting the wrongs of ItsSliker.