Steecky Thoughts #9: The short story of the billion dollars underage illegal gambling market [3 min]

A blog by @ooak

It's a place for me to give birth to my thoughts. Meta  thoughts about "Steemit", external thoughts about life and experiences.  My aim is to bring value to people, entertain the audience and craft my  writing skills all at the same time. I will write short to medium size  blogs because I believe that today more than ever time is money and  attention is hard to get.

Online gambling or betting is a highly  regulated market. Many countries ban them entirely (like the USA). Here  is a short story about how an unregulated underage billion dollars gambling market had developed under the noses of authorities all over  the world. 

 Around the summer of 2013 Valve (a game distributor  and publisher) had presented an update to their popular game Counter  Strike. The update presented design for different guns called "skins".  The "skins" can be earned and bought through the game. They also hold   monetary value according to their rarity in-game and are traded on the  "Steam Market".

Through the years since the introduction of  "skins" to the game many websites had opened using "skins" as currency.  You could use a "skin" to bet on professional games or could gamble them  in online type of casinos featuring roulette or card games. You could  also trade "skins" on 3rd party marketplaces for real money. The meaning  of it is that they hold real monetary value. Thousands of site  opened wanting to capitalize on this gambling frenzy. Everyone could  gamble. Kids could gamble, citizen of countries were gambling is banned  could gamble. There was no regulation due to the fact it's considered as  "virtual items" who has no value in the real world.

Everything  was going smoothly in the skins gambling world until few months ago it  started to collapse. A known streamer that was sponsored by a gambling  site exposed the fact that the games were rigged. He used this  information to show on his videos how he won big sums of money. Of  course most of his users were young naïve kids that were primed to  swallow the pill and dive into gambling. This exposure was the first  domino to tip. It caused a series of exposures of different sites and  figures of the streaming and Counter Strike community.

Few  known streamers who used to gamble live or on videos, owned gambling  websites. They never disclosed the fact they owned the website they were  gambling on. They also presented a false showing of them winning big  knowing the games were rigged in their favor.

Currently there  are some official lawsuits against them and it is yet to be seen what  kind of legal action will be taking. The fact is that they ran illegal  gambling websites. Didn't disclose the fact they own the sites. They  also tempted underage users to gamble. Valve as a large   corporation panicked and started sending letters of cease and desist to  gambling sites. They stated that those sites using their API are  breaking their TOS. Although those sites operated for years with Valve  knowingly helping them.

In the fight between "humanity" and  "Greed", "humanity" lost. Valve profited from skins selling. Sites were taken advantage of young and stupid kids to scam their money. Also  famous online figures wanted to profit from it by opening or partnering  with sites. They lured their followings to gamble.
This story  also shows you that regulation is painfully slow. A Billion dollar  industry of illegal underage gambling can operate without interference  for 3 years.

Here is a good video [13:37 min] exposing one of those sites owners:

Shower Thought: Steemit can facilitate legal sports betting without risking money. 

@ooak signing out…

#steemit #steem #blog #writing #gambling