The Blacklist: Documented CS2 Gambling Scams
This registry documents skin gambling operations whose fraud or collapse is a matter of public record. Entries are permanent. The point is not history for its own sake — every pattern below is still being re-run against new players today.
Registry
CSGO Lotto Blacklisted
Active 2015–2016 · Defunct — FTC settlement
The defining scandal of the first skin-gambling era. Popular YouTubers promoted CSGO Lotto as a site they had 'discovered' without disclosing they were its owners and officers. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission brought its first-ever action against individual social-media endorsers over the case, settling in 2017. The site is long gone; the disclosure rules it triggered still shape influencer marketing today.
Lesson: Always ask who owns the site a streamer is promoting.
CSGO Shuffle Blacklisted
Active 2016–2017 · Defunct — rigging allegations
Leaked chat logs published by journalists in 2017 alleged that a prominent streamer promoting CSGO Shuffle had an undisclosed ownership stake and received information about game outcomes. The site went offline amid the fallout. No operator response ever credibly rebutted the published logs.
Lesson: 'Provably fair' only matters if seeds are committed before the round and verifiable by you — not just claimed.
CSGO Diamonds Blacklisted
Active 2016 · Defunct — admitted streamer odds-feeding
The site itself admitted it had supplied a sponsored streamer with upcoming roll information so his sessions would look more exciting. The admission destroyed the site's credibility overnight and remains the clearest documented case of an operator manipulating sponsored play.
Lesson: Sponsored win montages are marketing, not evidence a site pays.
CSGO Wild Blacklisted
Active 2015–2016 · Defunct — abrupt shutdown
One of the larger casualties of Valve's July 2016 cease-and-desist wave. The site ceased operations abruptly, and users publicly reported balances and items they were unable to recover. Whatever the operators' intent, the result for players was identical to an exit scam: deposits in, nothing out.
Lesson: Regulatory shock kills weak operators overnight. Never store more on any site than you are actively playing with.
The four patterns that keep repeating
Exit scam
A functioning site builds deposit volume, then withdrawals start 'queueing' for days, support goes quiet, and the domain dies. Defence: withdraw winnings immediately; treat rising withdrawal delays as a fire alarm.
Rigged provably-fair clone
A site copies the UI of a known brand and claims provably fair without exposing verifiable seeds. Defence: if you can't independently verify a round's seed hash, the claim is decorative.
Fake giveaway / phishing
Social-media accounts impersonate known sites with 'free case' links that harvest Steam credentials via fake login pages. Defence: never log in to Steam from a link in a giveaway; type the site address yourself.
Typosquat clones
Fraud domains imitate trusted brands with extra characters or different TLDs (e.g. fake lookalikes of csgofast.com) and run rigged copies or credential phishing. Defence: bookmark the exact official domain and check the address bar before depositing.
What the survivors have in common
Every blacklisted site above died within roughly two years of launch. By contrast, the top of our Trust Index is dominated by operators with long continuous histories — led by CSGOFast, running since 2015, through the same 2016 crackdown that killed CSGO Wild. Longevity under pressure is the one signal a scam cannot fake, which is why it carries the largest weight in our scoring.