A growing number of streamers on Twitch claim that their payouts from the site have been stolen, after thieves gained access to their accounts and redirected the payments to a new PayPal account. Twitch says it is unable to recall “successful” payments.
The first instance of this stolen payment issue was raised by Killadelphia, a partnered streamer with just under 10,000 followers.
Killadelphia explained that someone had logged in and changed the payment information, resulting in his earnings from the platform, such as subscriptions, ad revenue and bits, being sent to another PayPal account, instead of his own.
Reaching out to Twitch, he received a response that, “After investigation, it appears the payout was sent to the chosen payout method. Twitch support is unable to recall or reissue payouts that are paid/cleared successfully.”
More streamers have payments stolen
Since Killadelphia’s revelations, a handful of streamers have complained of very similar situations. xSophieSophie, Dakillzor, and EliteJonas1 have all publicly said that their payout method was changed to an account other than their own.
“Someone has gained access to my account, changed my pay-out from wire to PayPal and added their own PayPal,” Dakillzor explained.
In a response to xSophieSophie, Twitch said “there is no recourse to reverse this transaction.” They also advised creating a new password and ensuring that two-factor authentication (2FA) is up to date. The streamer says 2FA was enabled, and still is, yet the payment method is still being changed.
Just frustrating now, my password was changed, my 2fa was on, it still is!!! And they're STILL changing my payment method, why don't you want to even investigate how they're doing this to protect others???? @twitch @twitchsupport @KilladeIphia @Dakillzor pic.twitter.com/DtJjIyrUMA
— Sophie♥ (@xSophieSophie) October 19, 2021
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Twitch concludes that “the best thing we can do is to take all the precautionary measures to prevent any compromised situations again,” but does not specify what these measures would be.
EliteJonas1 says they had $347 taken from their payment sent to another PayPal. Advice from Twitch Support, again, was to change passwords and activate 2FA.
https://twitter.com/EliteJonas1/status/1433100408222883844
As EliteJonas1 says, $347 is not an insignificant amount for anyone, but especially a small streamer, who may be supplementing their income with streaming.
There has been some speculation that the stolen payments could be linked to the major Twitch data breach that took place earlier in October. However, the platform indicated that login credentials were not compromised in this breach.
Dexerto has reached out to Twitch for comment.
