The problem with Roobet & fake bets

Ever since Xposed's '$500,000 win', fake bets have been a hot topic of debate.

On one side, many people believe that Roobet's misleading marketing tactics are immoral and deceptive. On the other side, fans of Roobet and the streamers are defending their actions by saying that there's nothing wrong with creating fake content, as long as they are "honest" about it.

Today, I thought I'd write this post to explain why I believe that this sort of marketing is highly immoral.

Fake bets? How does that work?

Roobet has an extremely aggressive marketing strategy; They pay truckloads of money to streamers, who will 'gamble' with fake, non-withdrawable money on Roobet for hours and hours. For some streamers, this is literally a full-time job; Their job is to just spam the slot machine on Roobet, and when they finally hit a 'big win', they start screaming out of joy with their blatantly faked reactions, pretending as if all of their financial worries are now gone because of the 'big win'. Truth of the matter is this; This is fake. Whether they win or lose, that may not have any impact on the streamer's final payment which they receive from Roobet.

There are two commonly known deal formats for fake bets:

1) Betting with 'house-money'

This is pretty simple; Roobet will give them a massive amount of funds on the site to gamble with, but here's the twist; They don't actually get to keep the winnings. It's the equivalent of gambling with chocolate coins, or monopoly money.

In order to make it look real, Roobet may advice the streamers to make some fake withdrawals, even though in reality, either this amount is deducted from their sponsorship contract payment, or they are required to deposit the money back later.

With this format, all the bets, the reactions, and the "wins", are 100% faked.

2) Bet amount inflation

In some cases, the streamer will actually be betting some real money, but the numbers are massively inflated. For example, a streamer may want to gamble with $100, but Roobet will multiply the numbers by 1000 to make it look as if the streamer is actually gambling with $100,000.

What does Roobet have to say about this?

Before calling out Roobet publicly, I've been trying to reach out to them for several months.

I tried to reach out to them through mutual contacts, and I even spoke to a few of their employees. Each path was a dead-end; Their employees told me that they would bring this up with their "big boss", but in the end, no real answers were given.

We even reached out to their VIP customer support, whom told us that they have no knowledge whatsoever about any "fake bets" being placed, and they gave us an email address which was also a dead-end.

We also confronted them in their Bitcointalk thread, but again, we were promptly ignored.

Ironically, one of the Roobet founders is a friend of mine. While he was in there, Roobet's slogan was "The Honest Online Casino". Then, Roobet was sold, and their slogan was changed to "Crypto's fastest growing casino", which is quite accurate; Roobet dropped the honesty, the transparency, and they started using incredibly dirty marketing tactics, which technically might make them "Crypto's fastest growing casino".

I don't have any evidence to present for this one at this stage, but I can also tell you that the new owners are not the most trustworthy people in this industry. They also originate from the CSGO gambling scene, and they certainly didn't leave that scene with a good reputation. Anyway, that's a topic for another day.

What does Xposed have to say about this?

Shortly after posting his video on Twitter with more than 370,000 views, the community was quick to call him out. Here's Xposed's answer:

I did also call him out, and what was his response? He removed my comment, and he immediately blocked me, among dozens of other people calling him out.

But, but... they're "honest" about this!

No, they're not. As you can see above, they are putting a lot of effort into hiding the truth from the wider audience.

In attempt to justify their actions, they do show some small disclaimers about the fact that the content is fake. In the middle of their long livestreams, they may throw quick comments out there, but even then, they use highly confusing, misleading, and indirect language to explain this. However, it's safe to say that over 99% of the viewers that end up seeing content of these "big wins", they have not seen the disclaimer which states that it's all fake.

In fact if you look at Xposed's Youtube videos which have hundreds of thousands of views each, there are absolutely zero disclaimers. When you read through the comment section, you will see lots of people who actually believe that the content is real.

Fake bets are fundamentally dishonest

Regardless of any disclaimers, I believe it's fundamentally immoral to advertise such fake bets.

• There are zero legitimate reasons to inflate the bet amounts like this. They could keep the content real by betting with real, non-inflated amounts. However, they explicitly made the decision to push fake bets. And they do it because it works; The clickbaity 'wins' will get more views, and a lot of people will end up gambling on Roobet, after being left under the illusion that they can become financially successful by gambling, just like their favorite streamers do.
• It doesn't matter how many disclaimers they post – The majority of the viewers will not see the disclaimers.

There are lots of casinos out there who want to keep things real, and who are not willing to promote fake bets. As an example, on my website, we have a strict "no fake bets" policy – No matter if you're a streamer, a celebrity, or an employee of ours – You cannot bet with fake money. When people see someone else gambling with big amounts of money, they can be assured that it's always real. However, it's quite frustrating to see how many people are questioning our genuineness simply because people are nowadays so used to seeing fake bets.

• This is harmful for gullible people who are left under the impression that it's easier to win on Roobet than it really is.
• This is harmful for honest streamers who want to keep things real; Who's going to watch a honest streamer betting $100, when there's that dishonest guy "betting $1,000,000" on Roobet.
• This is harmful for competing casinos who want to keep things real. Again, it makes it increasingly difficult for them to stand out with honest ads. This ridiculous arms race of who can make the biggest fake bets has to be put to an end.

They haven't told you the full story.

Xposed claims that he's "keeping 25% of the winnings, and giving 5% to the chat."

I have some doubts about this; This is merely a speculation and a theory, but I believe they're not telling the full story here.

I believe that Roobet and Xposed have made a contract with a pre-determined final payment amount, and that the wins (or the losses) will not have any impact on the deal.

Let me make a quick demonstration:

1. For the sake of the example, let's say they agree to make an annual deal for $500k.
2. Roobet gives Xposed virtually unlimited amounts of money to bet with.
3. Xposed keeps on winning, withdrawing, depositing, and repeat.
4. In the end, let's say that Xposed's total withdrawal sum is $600k. In this case, he'd re-deposit $100k back to the site, just to even up the balance.

Note that this is a rather simple example, but you should get the point. If this theory is right, that would mean that Xposed's reactions are actually 100% fake. (Although worth noting that even if this particular theory is wrong, my original point still stands; Inflating the bet amounts is simply wrong.

I enquired Roobet and Xposed about this theory, which they promptly ignored.

Why am I going after Roobet in particular?

There are lots of casinos out there pushing fake bets, but Roobet is one in particular which caught my attention. Never have I seen any other gambling site running as large-scale operation of misleading advertisements.

What makes this exponentially more disgusting is that Roobet is very clearly targeting children with their ads; Roobet has been heavily investing into ads on TikTok, and by sponsoring Youtubers such as Jake Paul and Ricegum.

I never really paid much attention to Roobet, until recently, when I was dealing with a case involving one of Roobet's biggest partners; m0e_tv.

If you don't know who Moe is – He's one of the biggest fraudsters in the CSGO gambling scene, who was caught for partnering up with a casino, and collaborating with them to rig the bets in his favor. I'm the one who has been working on exposing Moe for his shady activities, and in return, Moe launched a massive slander attack towards me and my company, by publicly attempting to frame me as a pedophile, among lots of insanely aggressive personal attacks. You can read the absolutely crazy story about this here. After all of this, it still blows my mind that Roobet is willing to work together with Moe.

Where would they draw the line?

The road of doing dishonest and shady business is a slippery slope;

• How can we trust anything that Roobet says or shows to us?
• Would they use fake gambling bots on their site to boost their traffic? I don't see why not.
• Would they do fake giveaways? I wouldn't be surprised.
• Would they be willing to rig their website for extra profits? That's a real concern.
• Where would they draw the line?

My motives

I've built quite a reputation in the past years, as I've been actively calling out shady operators in the online gambling industry.

As I happen to own a CSGO gambling site, there's a lot of speculation and accusations around my motivations. Many people seem to believe that I'm simply trying to take down all of my competitors.

However, that is simply not true – If you follow my work closely, you'll see that whenever I call out somebody, I do that with strong reasons, backed by evidence. I have a proven track record of taking down some of the biggest fraudulent operators in the scene, and I've managed to push the entire industry into a better direction, with better standards when it comes to legitimacy and transparency.

Also, when I see that competitors are doing things well, I give them credit for that publicly. I'm actually praising some of our biggest and most direct competitors, and I give credit where it's due. Also, my main goal is not to take anybody down – My goal is to make them clean up their act. There have been numerous occasions where I call out a competitor for doing something shady, and later on, I will give them praise for fixing it.

Anyway – Roobet isn't really a competitor of my business. My website is a CSGO skin casino, while Roobet is a cryptocurrency site. There's very little overlap with our audiences.

So, what's my motive behind this? It's hard for even me to pinpoint; It's rather complicated, but in a way, it's rather simple. I personally have more wealth than I could ever imagine spending, so squeezing every little penny from this business is not really worth it for me. However, I'm very passionate about this business, and it truly disgusts me to see when other sites do shady shit. I enjoy doing my best to clean up this scene.

Want to join the discussion on this topic? Join the conversation in this tweet.

-Monarch, owner of csgoempire.com