Stories like this really piss me off...
Two "popular" Youtubers (I put that in quotes because I never heard of them) TmarTn and ProSyndicate recently released videos showing them winning various skins/weapons at a site named CSGOLottery. For those not aware, CSGO Lottery sites have become more popular as of late, as they exploit a gray area of the law in regards to gambling. While it is currently illegal to gamble with money or tangible goods without some sort of legal authorization or license, there is NO law preventing digital goods in a game being gambled. The problem is that these items being gambled on have a real world cash value if traded on the Valve trading market. And it's not a small market either. According to this report by Bloomberg, it's a $2+ billion unregulated, underground business. Oh, and unlike regular gambling, there's NO age limit, meaning it's becoming very popular for teenagers who can't legally gamble via regular means.
But this isn't the focus of the thread here. The legalities of this practice are likely going to be VERY well defined in the near future as the result of a lawsuit brought against Valve for helping facilitate this market. Back to the Youtubers mentioned earlier, they showed various videos of them winning stuff on the website mentioned. What they didn't feel like telling anyone though was that they OWNED THE COMPANY! TmarTn himself is actually the owner, founder, and even filed the corporate paperwork in Florida for the site! Another YouTuber named HonorTheCall was the one who broke this story by finding all the paperwork and filings associated with this. So in summary, these guys created this website without anyone knowing, didn't tell anyone they made it, and then pretended they weren't affiliated with it.
For those who don't know the law, that's VERY illegal. If you're doing promotion of a product or company and you are being paid by or have a financial stake in/work for the company, you need to clearly state that. So of course, once Tmar got caught, he backpedalled and claimed that he always disclosed it (he never did, and even went back to modify his video descriptions saying that it was sponsored) and called out those that were just being haters and trying to ruin him, the whole time failing to acknowledge the fact that A: He broke the law, and B: He was trying to get his millions of subscribers, many of them underage, to gamble on the website HE owned in order to get money from them. H3H3 did a great summary of the whole thing here:
I really hate stories like this. First off, the stupidity in doing this in that TmarTn did such an awful job trying to cover his tracks, and then thinking that there would be no way for him to be caught is just eyerollingly bad. Oh, and the whole thing of exploiting a gray law in order to get money from young kids just makes me sick. I'd love it if some judge somewhere decided to make an example of these guys and throw them in a real jail for 5 years. Probation ain't going to stop people like this. The risk of hard time will IMO.
Two "popular" Youtubers (I put that in quotes because I never heard of them) TmarTn and ProSyndicate recently released videos showing them winning various skins/weapons at a site named CSGOLottery. For those not aware, CSGO Lottery sites have become more popular as of late, as they exploit a gray area of the law in regards to gambling. While it is currently illegal to gamble with money or tangible goods without some sort of legal authorization or license, there is NO law preventing digital goods in a game being gambled. The problem is that these items being gambled on have a real world cash value if traded on the Valve trading market. And it's not a small market either. According to this report by Bloomberg, it's a $2+ billion unregulated, underground business. Oh, and unlike regular gambling, there's NO age limit, meaning it's becoming very popular for teenagers who can't legally gamble via regular means.
But this isn't the focus of the thread here. The legalities of this practice are likely going to be VERY well defined in the near future as the result of a lawsuit brought against Valve for helping facilitate this market. Back to the Youtubers mentioned earlier, they showed various videos of them winning stuff on the website mentioned. What they didn't feel like telling anyone though was that they OWNED THE COMPANY! TmarTn himself is actually the owner, founder, and even filed the corporate paperwork in Florida for the site! Another YouTuber named HonorTheCall was the one who broke this story by finding all the paperwork and filings associated with this. So in summary, these guys created this website without anyone knowing, didn't tell anyone they made it, and then pretended they weren't affiliated with it.
For those who don't know the law, that's VERY illegal. If you're doing promotion of a product or company and you are being paid by or have a financial stake in/work for the company, you need to clearly state that. So of course, once Tmar got caught, he backpedalled and claimed that he always disclosed it (he never did, and even went back to modify his video descriptions saying that it was sponsored) and called out those that were just being haters and trying to ruin him, the whole time failing to acknowledge the fact that A: He broke the law, and B: He was trying to get his millions of subscribers, many of them underage, to gamble on the website HE owned in order to get money from them. H3H3 did a great summary of the whole thing here:
I really hate stories like this. First off, the stupidity in doing this in that TmarTn did such an awful job trying to cover his tracks, and then thinking that there would be no way for him to be caught is just eyerollingly bad. Oh, and the whole thing of exploiting a gray law in order to get money from young kids just makes me sick. I'd love it if some judge somewhere decided to make an example of these guys and throw them in a real jail for 5 years. Probation ain't going to stop people like this. The risk of hard time will IMO.
