Intimidation, gambling, harassment, investigative journalism, and… Counter-Strike?

Coffeezilla, YouTube’s premier investigative journalist and scam buster, has released a new video (series) on CS gambling. Only Part 1 is live on YouTube, but Part 2 has already gone up on his Patreon, and let's say it’s not looking great. We’ll leave out lots of details, so please check out the video if you can.

Of course, not everyone has 25 minutes to watch a man talk to a CGI robot about CS gambling, so we’ll do our best to cover the important bits.

This story came onto Coffeezilla’s radar after Monarch, Owner of CSGOEmpire, the gambling website that stormed the Copenhagen Major stage, offered Coffee a “bribe” to investigate CSGORoll. If you remember the Copenhagen Major story, you’ll recall that that was sparked by their objection to CSGORoll’s sponsorship of G2. Hence why they “protested” during G2’s game with MOUZ. Take protest with a Major (ha) grain of salt.

But storming Major stages isn’t all this man has done.

He’s intimidated streamers sponsored by Roll, sending threatening DMs and, for one specific streamer, full thrusting. Monarchs’ goons spread flyers around his hometown with his face on it, calling him a scammer who scams children – which coming from another CS Casino owner, is quite rich. They even sent 18 people to his house to march around it and chant, like, again, “protestors.”

If it isn’t already obvious, these are mafia intimidation tactics. And their implications are big for the scene.

While most of this won’t be news to a lot of the CS community, it never reached mainstream attention. Meanwhile, this video already has over 2 million views at the time of writing, and we promise you most of those people don't know what a fire serpent is. The last time we had this much attention on CS and Gambling was 8 years ago during the Syndicate and TmarTn drama, and the consequences that had for Valve and skin trading are still felt to this day. Even if it was much less… serious.

We’ll be keenly watching where this story goes because it might have wide-reaching implications for our game. Won’t somebody think of the Skin investors D: