Operators of CS:GO case-opening sites have dealt with issues over the past couple of years dealing with many of the gamblers being minors and Valve threatening legal action against all the betting sites. Despite this, many of them are still open and are still racking in insane amounts of money.
According to a new report by veteran esports journalist Richard Lewis, these sites are highly deceiving their users through fake winners, sponsors, and bias winrates. Lewis spoke with a former coder for several case-opening sites and told Lewis he stopped coding for them due to their “inherently dishonest and deceptive” business tactics.
The source, who wished to remain anonymous, said that the sites choose their winners manually with them being determined by “the house.” Some sites even have something refereed to as “Rape mode,” which preemptively gives the two cheapest skins from any case every time. The source stated..
“On the front of the site it says you can win a knife, or an expensive item. Meanwhile the site has it set to zero so you literally can’t. Every site I’ve worked on does it this way and requests these features.”
Another example involves the “recently won” display feed being manipulated to only show the high valued skins. The source said “One site I worked on even had it coded so it manually removed all the lower items from the recent wins, so it appeared that it was only giving out premium items.”
Other allegations include content creators sponsored or promote the site are allegedly in on the scam, winnings skewed in favor of owners and sponsors, and item stacking which is a tactic that used to delay users from acquiring their winnings. These item stackings can sometimes take over 30 days to acquire, which are all scams.
