A popular YouTuber and investigative journalist, Coffeezilla, has decided to investigate Counter-Strike: Global Offensive online casinos. The man usually focused on cracking down on crypto scams. However, his attention was drawn to the multiplayer game after CSGOEmpire casino attempted to bribe him into investigating a rival casino, CSGORoll. Instead of accepting the money, Coffeezilla opted to look into the topic thoroughly and unveil the underage gambling problem among CS: GO fans.
Coffeezilla uploaded three lengthy videos with around one and a half hours of watch time. The man started by investigating the online casinos and the CS: GO influencers they hired to promote their sites. According to various interviews shown in the video, it is obvious that many influencers keep accepting the promotional deal due to the large sum of money the casinos offer. Even Esports teams also have to accept these deals since online casinos tend to pay much more than other companies.
Promoting their questionable services isn’t the only thing that these online CS: GO casinos have done. For example, the owner of CSGOEmpire, Monarch, has a habit of hiring people to harass those who dare to accept deals from CSGORoll. The most famous example is when he told a group of people to rush onto the stage and condemn CSGORoll during the PGL CS2 Copenhagen Major event. Recently, Monarch hired people to harass a streamer named Grimm, who partnered with CSGORoll.
Although this chain of harassment is horrible, Coffeezilla decided to dig deeper to search for the root cause of the problem. In the process, he discovered that many of these online CS: GO casinos never request ID from their customers, which leads to underage gambling. He even interviewed many players who got addicted to gambling. They all said that they developed this bad habit after starting to gamble at a young age due to CS: GO.
Ultimately, Coffeezilla placed the blame on Valve, which added the lootbox feature to CS: GO. He argued that the company hadn’t been very proactive at stopping the casinos since these casinos helped Valve gain money. After all, loot boxes are too similar to slot machines, and skins are so desirable since players can sell them in the marketplace or gamble them in casinos. “No one else can unilaterally shut this down except for them,” Coffeezilla said, “and at the same time, no one makes so much money from keeping it open and lying about what exactly these cases are using the same arguments casinos have been making for decades as Valve.”
