Troll streams have been taking over the CS:GO category on Twitch yet again, using Michael ‘shroud’ Grzesiek and Oleksandr ‘s1mple’ Kostyliev’s names to promote scam giveaways.
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Typically, the only times you’ll find Counter-Strike: Global Offensive dominating the Twitch viewership charts is when there’s a major tournament on the go, a former pro like Shroud makes a surprise return, or a celebrity like Neymar shows off their skills.
However, there are times when the game gets some incredible viewing numbers when trolls decide to take over the section and capitalize on its popularity.
These trolls claim to be someone like Shroud, s1mple, or NiKo while running fake giveaways that put the Steam accounts of CS:GO fans in danger of being hacked.
These fake streams pop up every few months, and have been called out by pros like s1mple in the past, however, neither the pros or Twitch have been able to completely stamp them out yet.
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On October 25, with the ESL One New York CIS tournament attracting thousands of viewers, these trolls struck once again by using old VODs from both s1mple and Shroud, once again claiming that fans can win prizes by getting involved.
In fact, at one point, the two channels were in the top three watch channels of the day – amassing 22,000 and 17,500 viewers respectively – and sitting just behind the main Russian stream for ESL One New York CIS.
https://twitter.com/anomalyxd/status/1320339832338567168
The two channels that cropped up intially, s1mple6282 and ShroudWRBE, have since been deleted, but other channels named s1mple1021 and ShroudRXND have taken their place.
At the time of writing, both channels have been running the same fake giveaways and graphics, as well as the same past VODs from both s1mple and Shroud, so it might hard to tell the difference to some viewers, but they’re not the real thing.