Personal Vendetta

We are aware that over the last few weeks, there have been a lot of negative posts about us and our sister sites. There are too many to list here, but we wanted to comment as it is important our community knows the facts. These lies are mainly being posted by malicious competitors to our businesses.

These malicious competitors have engaged in a hate campaign against us, and claim that we are running “scam websites”. We do not know their motive, but we suspect that it is a personal vendetta, based on a grudge and is designed to try and harm our business and gain a competitive advantage for themselves. By spreading misinformation, making false claims against us and our founder, and threatening our partners, they have harmed the industry as a whole.

Setting the record straight

They are particularly focused on alleging that we are not processing withdrawals. This is simply not true. The vast majority of withdrawals are processed immediately. In occasional cases, we have to (like all sites should) ask for more information to comply with Know Your Client (KYC) and Anti Money Laundering (AML) obligations and regulations, which are imposed on us by law.

In the last 6 months, CSGORoll has instantly processed over 2.5 million withdrawals, only 40,000 of these withdrawals went through manual checks via our withdrawal approval process, which is set up to ensure that we comply with our legal obligations. In 99% of cases, withdrawals are processed instantly. Moreover, of these 40,000 manual checks, 39,000 of them were reviewed and approved by us within an hour.

Secondly, the malicious competitors are blaming us for a lack of liquidity of skins. As we noted in our blog post on 2 July, a recent wave of bans have affected not just us but many other businesses in the industry – please see this post for more information.

This is completely outside our control and is affecting the wider trading community. The issue is actually being made worse by their public attacks.

An initial ban wave came shortly after a list of accounts was anonymously and arbitrarily posted on Twitter and accused of money laundering. This list was clearly compiled very rudimentarily. Around one-third of the accounts that were named had either never logged into CSGORoll, or if they had, had not traded a single item on CSGORoll in the last six months. Despite this, those who shared absolutely no recent trading links with CSGORoll were banned.

On 5 July 2023, a ban wave affected 13 accounts which lost a significant amount of skins. Shortly after, a tweet was published by a malicious competitor, labelling these accounts as traders on CSGORoll. We can confirm that of these 13 accounts, none ever logged into or traded on CSGORoll. We have been advised that many of the accounts banned did in fact log into another particular malicious competitor’s website, and shared their Steam API Key with them. We also know that an internal list of these accounts was circulated to this particular website. Shortly after, they all happened to be banned.

There are a few plausible explanations:

  1. Coincidence: The ban wave that occurred on 28 June 2023 merely coincided with the release of the spreadsheet. The bans by Steam affected a large volume of traders in general, rather than traders who were specifically active on any particular platform. Steam mass-banned many accounts that day who also had a lot of trading activity. In fact, ~40+ accounts were banned within one hour, more than half of which were in no way related to the spreadsheet posted a few hours prior.
  2. Dirty Tactics: The fact that these bans, of a random group of accounts, all occurred at the same time points to a coordinated, malicious competitor attack.

The recent ban wave on 2 July 2023 was the largest in terms of the total inventory sizes banned. In total, it affected eight Steam accounts. None of these were listed on any spreadsheet. None of them ever traded on CSGORoll.

We would like to reiterate that, while over 180 accounts have been banned to date, more than half of these accounts have never traded on CSGORoll.

The malicious competitors have also levelled an accusation of illegal gambling at us. We are committed to maintaining a fair and responsible environment for all our users. We have privileged legal opinions from top law firms in our main markets which confirm that our business model is not prohibited in these jurisdictions.

The malicious competitors have also made various other attacks on us which are so laughably absurd and false, that we will not be addressing them.

What are we doing to address the issue?

We remain sensibly cautious of the negative effects that Steam trade bans can have on our Skins marketplace and on the Skin community as a whole. In spite of this, trading has already begun to pick up again due to actions that we have taken and we are currently processing in excess of 750,000 Coins in withdrawals per day. We are confident that stability will return to the community, as it has done numerous times before. This is by no means the first slowdown that the industry has experienced, only for trading to come rallying back.

We expect liquidity in our marketplace to improve even further in the coming days through our efforts. Part of this effort is addressing the spread of misinformation and negative attention which is risking harm to the entire community.

The information we’ve gathered also suggests that a malicious competitor caused at least some of the trade bans themselves. We don’t know for certain the cause of these trade bans, but the information gathered has led us to be cautious in this regard. We strongly advise traders to be cautious before trading on this particular malicious competitor’s website or supplying your Steam API key to them.

We are taking legal action against the malicious competitors who have defamed or threatened us and our community. We have worked hard to build a safe and rewarding environment for our users which serves millions of you in this community. It is clear from the many millions of successful transactions that we have completed over many years that we are not running scam websites. These
accusations are laughable, and we will do everything we can to protect you and us.


Our track record speaks for itself

We are proud of maintaining the highest possible standards in the community.

We will continue to push our business forward in the most transparent way and lead the industry as we have always done by offering legitimate, and rewarding services, to our customers and partners.

Thank you for your continued support

We hope this helps clarify things, but feel free to reach out if you need to. We remain dedicated to upholding the integrity and authenticity all our sites were founded upon, and we appreciate your continued support as we help fight against this smear campaign, which is not only an attack on us, but is an attack on the whole community.