There appears to be an ongoing modus operandi on Twitch concerning suspicious casino gaming channels manipulating views in order to rake in the dough. The issue has emerged in recent weeks when Twitch users noticed a significant number of new channels coming out and gaining tens of thousands of views in just a short span of time. The views suddenly shoot up, bringing these channels to the top of Twitch’s popular channels list.
Long-time channels like CasinoDaddy, with more than 60,000 followers, usually feature a list of streamers who regularly chat and interact with each other, providing entertainment value while they try their luck in digital games such as roulette, blackjack, blitz, table games and slots. CasinoDaddy also floods its channel’s description with a lot of casino ads offering bonuses to players.
However, some new channels have been popping up with the sole intention of raking in the money without exerting that much effort. These channels only feature a video feed of jackpot games, with anonymous users chatting non-sense messages.
Dirty Tactics
Casinoblast is one of those relatively new channels but had 25,000 viewers during its streaming debut just a few days ago. The channel only showed a jackpot game playing by itself. It only has 20 followers, which seems weird given the number of views it generated when it started. Even established channels like CasinoDaddy only gain 2000-3000 concurrent viewers. There are allegations that manipulation tactics have been used to boost views.
One Twitch user shared what he discovered while streaming on Twitch. He said someone may have been using dirty tactics to climb to the top of the casino section, eventually making huge sums of money. Chats are also flooded with bots. The said user posted his discovery at Twitch’s official Twitter account but did not receive any reply.
Apparently, these new channels are on the rise, with lots of them already included in TwitchMetric’s most popular list. Casinoblast, Dubrix_Casino and John_Casinogame are just three of a handful of channels following the same modus operandi based on a report from a blogger from gaming website Kotaku.
Bots In Action
The blogger compiled a number of screenshots to prove his claim. In one of those screenshots, a channel with more than 10,000 concurrent viewers seemed to be invaded with chat bots. One user came in and asked everyone to press 1 into chat to prove they weren’t a bot and no one did it.
Channels Showing Similar Gambling Ads
One thing that’s obvious is that these channels are advertising the same gambling sites. Twitch managed to ban some of them but the same M.O. continues using fresh channels. Majority of the gambling sites being advertised in these channels cannot be accessed by US-based users. The culprits might have been targeting users in Russia and the UK as the gambling laws in the two countries are different.
Dubrix_Casino and John_Casinogame have been banned as of today but Casinoblast is well in operation. Looking at the latest data from TwitchMetric, it’s hard to believe that this is an isolated case. Seven of these channels are currently in the top 50 most popular channels on Twitch, based on number of viewers, in just seven days.
They basically come out all of a sudden for a day and immediately gain a massive number of viewers. Within the day they stream and advertise the same gambling sites, and then make money out of it. They’ll stream for several hours until Twitch bans them.
A number of the gambling sites appearing in the channels have been contacted by Kotaku but they remained silent. The matter was also raised with Twitch. A representative said they will check the issue.
What’s most concerning is that many of these new channels are giving open access to everyone, including minors. This comes amid gaming-related gambling controversies being put under the spotlight, such as the Counter Strike gambling fiasco in 2016. People were hitting out at gaming firms during the time for not doing enough to prevent kids from being lured into online gambling.
For now, there’s not much noise on Twitch’s casino section with just less than 20,000 viewers spread across the channels. We will have to wait and see whether Twitch finally investigates and identifies the root of this anomaly.