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CSGO Item Trading Scandals

9/24/2023

It's never a good thing when a developer must step in and make a major change to a game because people decide to be nefarious with the mechanics or features. This is the situation with in-game item trades in CS:GO.

 

Valve had to do the right thing and halt the trading of some of these items. For context, CS:GO allows players to earn containers that hold cosmetic items.

 

The said containers can be unlocked with keys that you can either purchase in-game or from other players for real money. Of course, the feature was meant to be capitalized on by legitimate customers, which was the case initially.

 

However, newly purchased keys had to be prevented from being marketable or tradeable, and the two concerns covered below certainly contributed to this.

 

CSGOLotto

 

Unregulated real money gambling is quite a concern and has even been the cause of class-action lawsuits being filed against Valve.

 

This scandal features ProSyndicate and TmarTn, quite popular YouTube stars. The two posted videos on their channels with clickbait titles indicating that they got big winnings from a site known as CSGoLotto.com.

 

In fact, the two even showed footage of their attempts to win on the site and doing so in tremendous fashion. Essentially, CSGoLotto.com requires skins to be put up as bargaining chips. These skins would have been earned in-game.

 

Based on how coveted each skin is, it's assigned a value. Bets are then taken from a set of players, with a randomizer picking a winner who gets the entire pot. 

 

Keys can then be resolved with the platform’s trading system and cashing out becomes possible through buying games as gifts and selling the codes on multiple different platforms.

 

You may ask the question, what's the big deal with two YouTubers using a gambling site? Well, HonorTheCall and H3H3 productions, two other YouTube channels, made quite an interesting discovery.

 

CSGoLotto.com was jointly founded by TmarTn and ProSyndicate. Of course, this violates YouTube’s payment disclosure requirements. This resulted in a lawsuit that initially involved Valve, but now only includes CSGoLotto.com and other sites like it.

 

High Scale Money Laundering

 

This is arguably the more egregious of the two. It may not seem that way because the names behind it are largely unknown, but it heavily influenced Valve’s eventual decision to close things down.

 

The bulk of trading, instead of coming from legitimate sources, was believed to be rooted in fraud. Essentially, after commissions of credit card fraud and other financial infractions, fraudsters need a channel to launder the money.

 

Digital commodities are often used to pull this off. Of course, having a trading system as it did, CS:GO seemed to be the perfect target.

 

Final Remarks

 

The trading scandals surrounding CS:GO are certainly cause for concern, especially when you consider accusations leveled at Valve for encouraging gambling in a game marketing to children and even enabling the money laundering and other less than stellar activities coming out of the trading system. There’s a reason the game has more notable inquiries than any other. Instead of buying items, we recommend you to dedicate time to improving your gameplay. An efficient way to do so is hiring a trained CSGO coach who will help you get better at any aspect of the game. Remember, skill wins you games, skins don’t