On Tuesday, Turkish police in eleven different provinces took forty suspects into custody for an alleged money laundering scam perpetrated using the Twitch streaming platform.
According to Demirören News Agency (via Daily Sabah and Dexerto), the suspects are accused of using stolen credit cards to buy Bits, which are essentially the platform’s virtual currency. Those Bits were then allegedly sent to streamers, who then paid the scammers real money through a 70 to 80 percent refund.
So, if the scammers bought 1,000 Bits for $10, this could be a way for them to make $7 or $8 from a stolen credit card, and streamers to pick up the difference. Compound more stolen credit cards and much higher dollar amounts, and you end up with a scam that could total an estimated $9.8 million.
This appears to be a long-running operation, with an email paper trail going back two years.
Daily Sabah covered the suspected scam in November 2021, after a thread titled “Thief KO streamers” appeared on well-known Turkish forum, frmtr.com. The thread alleged that some smaller streamers with only 40 to 50 viewers were making significant amounts of money. However, it wasn’t only forum threads that were sounding the alarm.
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