On December 18 2024, Popular Youtuber and Journalist Coffezilla who focuses on cryptocurrency and celebrity scams posted a video titled “I Got Bribed By Casinos, But I Exposed Them Instead”

In this video, he talked about how he received a mail sent by a Counter Strike gambling website trying to bribe them with 20.000$ into uncovering a rival gambling website. Coffezilla, in return, refused the bribe and decided to make a video uncovering the suspicious and illegal practices of these gambling sites.

Counter Strike 2 is a game released by Valve Corporation on their digital distribution platform, Steam. The game features skin crates in which players can spend money to unlock them and with a low chance, get gun skins that are worth more than the crate. In addition, players are allowed to use the Steam Marketplace to trade or buy and sell these skins.

In this three part video series, Coffeezilla goes into how these gambling websites try and take advantage of minors, allowing them to get used to gambling at a young age. In addition, he covers how Valve Corporation takes advantage of this fact and doesn’t take the required action against these sites, allowing them to gain millions of dollars via Steam Marketplace where players are able to buy and sell in-game items for Steam Wallet Funds (while paying the platform owner Valve Corporation around 15% of the item’s sale price), which cannot be withdrawn from their account but can be used to buy physical items such as Valve’s new gaming console, Steam Deck.

In addition, Coffezilla covers the technique used by Valve to allow these crates to be opened by players in France, where a law is in place preventing these kinds of luck games.

Until recently, Steam’s User Agreement had a forced arbitration, resuting in players who agreed to this agreement not being able to sue the company over these practices. One notable example of a lawsuit attempt was in 2022 where a parent had sued Valve Corporation over Counter Strike skin gambling but the case eventually got dismissed. On September 27, 2024 Valve Corporation removed the forced arbitration clause from their user agreement, opening the doors to future lawsuits.