Popular YouTubers Trevor ‘TMarTn’ Martin and Tom ‘ProSyndicate’ Cassell could be facing jail time over the controversy over them owning CS: GO Lotto. For those of you out of the loop, firstly, how have you not heard this story? Its everywhere!
Anyway, quick recap time. Counter Strike: Global Offense on Steam has a system that allows players to buy and sell weapon skins for actual, real life money, some of which costing up to thousands of dollars. With this system, some external users have set up lottery sites where people can gamble, win or lose a lot of skins, making a possible profit in the process from the monetary value. One of these sites is CS: GO Lotto and the controversy involves the YouTubers mentioned above promoting and recording themselves playing on this website. They also stated the website was sponsoring them. However people have found out that the two YouTubers actually own CS: GO Lotto. The problems arising from this are countless, not least of which is the possibility that they have the power to possibly rig the outcomes of these games.
So now that you’re all caught up here’s the situation so far. Cassell has been relatively quiet on the whole situation, while Martin has been uploading and removing a number of videos talking about the situation, defending himself and trying to apologise to his fans. Now, its been recently reported that there will be a lawsuit filed against Valve for the possible illegal gambling and Cassell and Martin have been added to it. Ryan Morisson, a New York attorney who works in the eSports community says, “What this did do, which is in my opinion wonderful, is really open up the eyes of people who can put criminal charges forward, because when attorney general see these high profile civil cases and controversies pop up they’re more likely to pursue them.”
So all in all it’s going to be very interesting to see how all of this unfolds. Will this whole skins lotto community be classified as illegal online gambling and be shut down, or will the entire situation come to nothing?
