Professional CSGO players Oleksandr ‘s1mple’ Kostyliev and Nicolai ‘dev1ce’ Reedtz have spoken out on the lack of measures against fake skin giveaway scammers on Twitch and Youtube.
Scammers of CSGO personalities such as Michael ‘shroud’ Grzesiek, s1mple and dev1ce have been roaming around streaming platforms with little consequence for a while. The problem reached new heights in late 2019, when s1mple initially started to comment on the situation.
The issue of fake streams has started to resurface again, and unsuspecting fans are being cheated out of their Steam inventories.
On October 27, the Ukrainian shared an email from a fan expressing their disappointment in having his CSGO inventory stolen after falling prey to a scammer impersonating s1mple on Twitch.
https://twitter.com/s1mpleO/status/1321050350007320578
Astralis player Nicolai ‘dev1ce’ Reedtz also voiced his unhappiness with the lack of action from Youtube, referencing his own problems with impersonators on the Google platform.
Same. Contacted @YouTube several times and no help. 😶 https://t.co/briaAb8FPo
— Nicolai Reedtz (@dev1ce) October 27, 2020
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The way these scammers operate is relatively straight-foward: they create an account pretending to be a famous personality or pro player and use old footage to simulate a live stream. They will then provide links to websites claiming to give free prizes, instead they ask for login details and sometimes more. Richard Lewis has previously covered the issue on Dexerto.
S1mple has pointed this issue out multiple times over the last eight months, however it seems that Twitch is unable or unwilling to deal with the growing problem on their platform.
Lets all together help Twitch find freelancers, so that they remove at least 1 fake stream per day
— Sasha (@s1mpleO) April 13, 2020
Just a couple of days ago, fake streams of shroud and s1mple appeared on the Amazon-owned platform with upwards of 20,000 viewers. These fake streams took over the CSGO section of twitch, claiming a higher percentage of viewers than the regional final of a major CS tournament.
While those accounts were eventually deleted, new ones have already taken their place. Twitch and Youtube have so far, failed to keep up with the problem of fake streams and this poses a risk to its users, with today’s one being the most recent example.
