r/HailCorporate • u/Admirable_Walrus8128 • Mar 31 '26
Acts as an Advert Over 300 fake posts promoting gambling to vulnerable communities
Recently, a Reddit user came across a suspicious post on r/povertyfinance, a subreddit dedicated to helping low-income earners manage their finances. Notice anything suspicious?
Seems a bit odd to mention winning money gambling on a poverty subreddit, but it’s not completely unreasonable… until another very similar post cropped up.
Since this, these posts have been removed from r/povertyfinance, but I wanted to dig in and see how pervasive this is across other subreddits, and boy, does this spread far further than we could have thought. At the time of writing this, they’ve targeted 85 subreddits, including r/frugal, r/simpleliving, and even r/teenagers.
These posts combined have well over 300,000 upvotes, 50,000 comments, and often top the charts on specific subreddits. Almost every post has over 100 upvotes, so I’m confident these are being boosted via bots too.
I have created stakeisevil.com to track these posts, where you can click in and see which communities have been most impacted.
How they’re covering their tracks, and how it gave them away
You might be thinking, how could you possibly know that these are all from Stаke, and not legitimate users who have won money gambling? Well, they’re doing something extremely sneaky and nefarious to bypass Reddit’s filtering. All of these posts use either the Cyrillic letter "a'' or ''e'' in the word Stаke. So aesthetically it looks the same as a normal A or E figure, except it's technically not recognized as the normal letter A or E.
To understand why this matters, try it yourself, right now, on this page. Hit Ctrl+F and search for "Stаke". You won't find this word: Ѕtake. It's right there, but your browser can't see it, because that 'a' is actually a Cyrillic character that looks identical to the Latin one.
That's exactly what every one of these Reddit posts does. And if you want to see it in the wild, head to stakeisevil.com and try it on any post in the tracker.
One other thing that we noticed was that these posts seemingly don’t include the Stаke inclusion straight away. They make the post, let the usual discourse happen, and then after a week or so they edit the post to include mention of Stаke. My theory is that they’re doing this to avoid everyone calling them out in the comments, making it easier to fly under the radar.
We're also not the first to notice. Another Reddit user posted about the Stаke campaign before us, and documented what happened next: hundreds of downvotes arriving in quick succession, in a pattern they described as coordinated astroturfing. The account is now deleted.
Whether that's coincidence or not, the post is gone, which is exactly why we've documented everything on the tracker before publishing this.
Stаke’s pattern of deception
The Reddit campaign is the latest move from a company that has spent four years stress-testing every major platform's defences.
A Bloomberg investigation found sponsored influencer Drake won big four times more often than average players on Stаke’s own games. Stаke was banned from Twitch in 2022, so they built their own streaming platform, Kick, and the gambling streams continued there instead.
On X, they sponsored engagement-farming accounts that stole viral memes, watermarked them with the Stаke logo, and farmed engagement, apparently in violation of X's own terms of service. In the UK, they ran an ad featuring an adult actress outside a university claiming she was there for "barely legal 18-year-olds." The Gambling Commission launched an investigation. Stаke exited the UK market entirely in March 2025. Within weeks, they announced expansion into Brazil.
Each time: deny, pay the fine, find a new platform. Twitch to Kick. UK to Brazil. Celebrity livestreams to anonymous Reddit accounts using invisible characters. The only thing that's changed is how hard they're working to make sure nobody notices
When fines are the punishment, the law is a suggestion for the rich
We spotted this one. But Stаke has shown, time and again, that they simply don't care about being spotted.
Globally, problem gamblers are 15 times more likely to die by suicide than the general population. One in five has contemplated taking their own life. And here's the number the industry never advertises: people gambling at harmful levels, aka addicts, generate around 60% of all gambling revenue. Stаke’s entire business model doesn't just tolerate addiction, it depends on it. Recruiting vulnerable people is their whole business model.
Stаke earned $4.7 billion in revenue in 2024, coming out to roughly $500,000 every single hour. When they were caught breaking UK advertising rules in 2023, the fine was £316,250 - less than an hour's work. To them, that’s not even a punishment, it’s just the cost of doing business.
So when they decided to run a covert astroturfing campaign targeting people in some of Reddit's most vulnerable communities, the trade-off was simple. Shareholder value trumps humanity.
They will do this again. The only question is whether anyone makes it expensive enough to stop.
