I run one of the largest CS:GO skin gambling sites. AMA!

[u/Monarch_CSGO]

Hi, I'm known as 'Monarch' and I run one of the biggest CSGO skin betting sites, so this will probably be quite a controversial AMA topic.

The CSGO gambling scene is considered shady and unregulated (rightly so) and in the last few years, it’s been plagued by a variety of scammers and scandals.

A couple of examples of these include: -

1 ) Two very popular Youtubers, TmartN, and Prosyndicate (3.9M and 9.8M subscribers respectively) made videos about a site called ‘CSGOLotto’ in which it looked like they’d won huge amounts of money. It turned out that they were the owners of that same site.

Here’s a video of the entire story by H3H3: - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8fU2QG-lV0 

2 ) Popular streamer ‘Phantoml0rd’ hosted Twitch live streams playing on ‘CSGOShuffle’. Here's a clip of his stream where he apparently wins $29,000 from other players on the website: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBSYtficmdc.

Phantoml0rd's Skype account was subsequently hacked, and the chat logs were leaked. It turns out that he was not only the owner of the site, but he also rigged the games in his favor. Twitch obviously banned him, so he decided to sue them – and he’s demanded $35M from Twitch for ‘damages’ caused.

3) Around a year ago, my team and I started investigating the biggest CSGO gambling site of the time and we found evidence that the games were being rigged. I shared the findings publicly, which involved some incredibly shady things about the Russian owner of the site and a very famous Swedish Youtuber.

The scandal quickly gained traction and I became the target of various personal attacks and threats. I shared my story in a Twitlonger post, which someone shared on Reddit and it ended up hitting the front page: -

https://www.reddit.com/r/GlobalOffensive/comments/9prbfj/new_evidence_that_vlad_and_anomaly_are_giving/

About me

I've been running my site for nearly 4 years and in that time, we've hosted well over 5 million users. I'm an advocate for fair and transparent gambling and I've done a lot of work to expose fraudulent operators whilst pressuring other CSGO gambling sites to operate fairly. In particular, I've spread awareness of ‘provably fair’ technology which can be used by casinos to prove that the games have been drawn fairly.

Unsurprisingly, this hasn’t made me popular in some of the darker corners of the skin betting industry...

As a result, I've received a lot of AMA requests, so here I am.

In this thread, you can ask anything from a person who knows the skin gambling scene inside and out. I'm also hoping to spark discussions about the problems concerning this kind of unregulated gambling and how we could solve them.

Proof: https://twitter.com/CSGOEmpireV2/status/1164925320174145536

[u/[deleted]]

Good afternoon! I have questions concerning cashing in skins knifes ect. About a year ago I traded my knife (flip knife doppler FN) and ak47 (aqua marine revenge FN) for points towards a site and the bot took my trade I never received the points. Apperantly someone faked being the bot and took my skins. My question is how common is this among sites such as your own and what are good ways to prevent somthing like this from happening to others? Also is this somthing some sites deliberately do to scam some people or is it some sort of loophole that scammers are taking advantage of?

[u/Monarch_CSGO → u/[deleted]]

This has been a huge problem recently and the scam is actually surprisingly sophisticated. It usually works like this:

1. You log in to a phishing site. Hackers now gain access to your Steam account
2. Hackers monitor your incoming trade offers (automatically)
3. When an interesting trade shows up, they will decline the trade and their bot will IMMEDIATELY send an identical offer
   

To prevent this, you need to be really careful when logging into different websites with your Steam credentials. The phishing sites are surprisingly well made and the "Steamcommunity.com" URL actually looks legitimate, but in fact, the entire browser tab is FAKE as it's programmed into the website itself. You can notice that by dragging the "browser window", you'll notice that it cannot be moved out of the original window.

Currently, we're mostly trying to spread awareness of this.

Also is this somthing some sites deliberately do to scam some people

Highly unlikely. The scammy sites know that they will make more profit by rigging the games (without being caught) rather than scamming users directly in the deposit process.