Twitch responds to gambling scam drama by banning some betting sites

techcrunch.com:

Twitch is cracking down on some gambling sites after a streamer scammed his peers out of tens of thousands of dollars to fuel a betting habit, kicking off a firestorm about how the platform should handle games of chance in the process.

Over the weekend, ItsSliker, a U.K.-based streamer who gained some popularity back in 2019 after appearing on game show streams, was accused of misleading Twitch figures into loaning him big sums of cash. According to Discord logs linked on a Reddit thread, ItsSliker claimed that his bank account was locked and he needed help while the account was frozen.

A number of big name streamers came forward with similar stories about being contacted to help ItsSliker out with his financial need under similar circumstances, including Ludwig Ahgren, Mizkif, Lukeafkfan and Trainwreck, who said he once gave the lesser known streamer a payment of about $45,000. Twitch’s most-watched streamer of 2021, xQc, vowed to help repay the money lost, estimating the total at around $300,000.

ItsSliker came clean about his gambling problem in a video over the weekend, admitting that he has a gambling addiction and explaining that it all started with making bets using in-game skins in the now decade-old game Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. After that, he “started to gamble with money,” moving on to sports betting.

“I’d come across streamers and ask them if I could borrow money,” he said. “And obviously I wouldn’t give them the reason, because it was gambling — I would lie to them.”

As the scandal spread, influential Twitch figures including Pokimane, Devin Nash, Mizkif, Ludwig, and Hasan Piker called on the company to ban gambling on the platform, with some threatening to boycott Twitch for a week or longer in protest.