The streamer Twitch and former member of Team Liquid ItsSliker recently admitted to stealing a colossal sum of money from his fans in order to fuel his gambling addiction, more specifically to CS:GO.
A debt estimated at more than 300,000 dollars
“I used to gamble a lot of my money. In fact, all of my Twitch money,” ItsSliker shared on Sept. 18 during a very emotional livestream.
“I would bump into streamers and ask them if I could borrow some money from them. I wouldn’t give them the reason, obviously. Since it was gambling, I was lying to them..The streamer emphasized that he had “never intended to scam anyone”, promising to refund the stolen money.
It was on September 17 that Sliker was the subject of a wave of anger on the web: a Twitch user allegedly shared a video in which ItsSliker asked for money from his community, claiming to have been refused access. access to his bank account. Content creators and quickly came forward afterwards, unraveling a long list of victims.
ItsSliker has since admitted to lying about having his bank account blocked, explaining that most of the borrowed money was spent on funding his gambling addiction or paying off previous addiction-related debts.
.xQc and Ludwig to the rescue
xQc and Ludwigtwo influential streamers have decided, in an outpouring of generosity and empathy, to reimburse the victims of the scam out of their pockets.
“We are aware of the case around Sliker and the individuals who had their hard earned money stolen. It is heartbreaking. @LudwigAhgren and I will do our best to reimburse these people. This is about the victims. Only them . It will take some time, it’s around $300,000.” he tweets.
This problem of gambling addiction is not an unknown subject for xQc, since he also admitted to being addicted to gambling. He claimed to have lost more than $2 million in online casinos this year, and even distributed promotional codes for a site called Stakesa site that naturally ended up in the list of platforms that will soon be banned by Twitch.
Unfortunately, addiction to gambling is not only triggered by casinos or other gambling in its most classic forms such as scratch games or sports betting. The lootboxes, for example, or even just “free-to-play” games with paid cosmetics, are extremely powerful triggers. This is what happened to Sliker, since he admitted to being addicted to CS:GO skins.
Sliker added: “That’s what the game did for me. […] this stuff is dangerous. This is the very example of a fucking addicted player. I used to lie to my viewers […]. I was constantly playing.”
He has since apologized for his actions and for “borrowing from hard working people”, then promised he would “get help”.