Popular YouTubers caught in CS:GO gambling scandal
Two popular YouTubers with a reach of over 10 million subscribers have found themselves in the middle of a scandal over their promotion of a CS:GO gambling site they own.
Tom “ProSyndicate” Cassell and Trevor “TmarTn” Martin have been promoting CS:GO Lotto in various videos on their immensely popular YouTube channel, all the while failing to disclose their ownership of the site. Some of these videos included Cassell and Martin showing viewers how to win large amounts of money within minutes or hyped reactions to winning bets on CS:GO Lotto.
According to a video titled Deception, Lies, and CS:GO posted by h3h3Productions, Martin and Cassell are named as the President and Vice-President of CS:GO Lotto, respectively. As result, there are a number of moral transgressions taking place as they promote the site in their videos.
Aside from steering unknowing viewers to a betting site Martin and Cassell own – and have since CS:GO Lotto’s beginning – one has to wonder about the possibility of rigging bets while gambling on the site.
On top of the CSGO Lotto disclosure fiasco, Martin is also a Team EnVyUs minority owner. In the wake of the scandal, Team EnVyUs has issued a statement regarding Martin and his involvement with the organization.
“When our company was just starting to grow into a functioning business, we gave a small amount of equity to Trevor in return for his advisement and support of our video content on the YouTube network. Trevor had and still has a very successful YouTube channel and we hoped to utilize his knowledge and reach to grow our own channels. However, we did not prioritize the growth of our YouTube channels or social media channels over fielding winning teams and building a support infrastructure for our players. To this day, our organization focuses on competition first and Trevor has not made any financial contribution or investment into our company.
Even though we had little use for Trevor’s services, we have always honored his small ownership stake and equity. This held true even when our company has seen monumental growth and Trevor’s contribution to the company has been very minimal or completely absent.
Additionally, Trevor has never been involved in the operational or decision making process of our team or company. He is not a managing partner, does not sit on our board and has a very small, minority stake in the business that operates Team EnVyUs,” Co-Owners and Managing Partners Mike Rufall and Tyler Thompson said.
CS:GO is a game with a huge fan base and a growing skins gambling market. Bloomberg reported 3 million people wagered $2.3 billion worth of skins in 2015, according to one estimate. Valve has done little to curb various CS:GO gambling sites.
Martin posted a vlog stating that his and Cassell’s ownership of CS:GO Lotto was “never a secret,” a statement refuted by documentation and footage of his own videos in which he talks about CS:GO Lotto sponsoring him and offering him skins to bet on the site but never discloses his ownership of the company.
While you can still find CS:GO gambling related videos on Cassell’s channel, Martin has removed CS:GO videos from his channel since news of their CS:GO Lotto ownership broke.
Michael Martin played Counter-Strike back in the day when they didn’t have all these fancy skins worth lots of money. Follow him on Twitter @Bizarro_Mike.
