Hey guys, I’m the ceo of vulcun - proof. We recently acquired Twitchalerts and Streampro a few months ago. The first thing we did was to remove the 1% fee that was being charged. The second thing we did was to add a +1% bonus program, available to everyone. That just finished and paid out $115K in bonuses last week, and you can see the reactions on stream as it happened live link. It was our way of giving back to the community, and we hope to do this regularly.
Athene, a streamer that I just heard about, recently launched a competing service called gamingforgood. I have no history with Athene personally, and initially I thought this was a good idea - help streamers raise money for charity. And it does seem like the money raised is actually being donated to Save the Children, and that’s a great thing for the community. All power to you bro. We will never question you on that, and ask others not to either.
However I have serious issues with the subversive and borderline illegal ways Athene is trying to promote his new product. Over the past 2 months, TwitchAlerts has been the target of a systematic campaign of hacking, impersonation, spam and abuse that the Twitch community needs to know about:
Athene asking viewers to target and spam TwitchAlerts streamers: In this video Athene asked his viewers to spam streamers using specially-prepared gamingforgood videos using donations on TwitchAlerts. This became a serious problem and many streamers complained to us. We blocked these videos last week as best we could, but literally every hour there are 10 different submissions trying to get around our spam filters. Violation of our Terms of Service, and of Twitch's TOS as well.
Athene asking viewers to harass our investors on-stream, directly: ty @HS_Slo for sending this video
Athene pairing individual users with hand-picked streamers to target for harassment: calls it a "great idea".
Athene viewers harassing our employees: In the process of targeting our streamers, many of Athene’s fans also added our employees on social media and started harassing them verbally. One of our employees (cronoh) broke down, lashed out, and said things he shouldn’t have. He has been reprimanded and suspended, and we apologized for his unacceptable behavior. It should not have happened, but he was under stress and being harassed. Other employees have had insulting and accusatory gifs made of them and passed around. Some were even physically threatened. By standing up to this harassment, we are standing up for our staff that is being harassed on a daily basis.
Hacking: Our employees’ accounts have been compromised on Twitch and Github. "It's good people are getting info on them, we don't have time to do it all ourselves" - Verbal quote by Athene in Discord which was followed by attached screen shots of them posting hacked accounts internally on their discord. This is direct evidence that Athene’s inner circle of people hacked the twitch oAuth accounts of 2 of our employees under his direction and encouragement. The Twitch hack took place using a vulnerability in a 3rd-party service that had implemented Twitch OAuth, which was being used by our employees. We asked Twitch to reset all affected tokens which they did last week. Hacking is a serious crime, and even though Athene/G4G did not do it personally, encouraging and directing your followers to do still makes you an accomplice and ringleader.
False accusations: Athene accused TwitchAlerts of keeping 1% without telling anyone. This is false, as discussed in this 1-year old reddit thread here. As the thread shows, the 1% fee last year was explained in a blog post, posted on our official twitter, and mentioned in an email newsletter. Most streamers knew about it. To claim that we never told anyone and gave no notice about the 1% fee is simply not true. Additionally, around six months ago we went completely free, and plan to remain so.
More false accusations: Athene claims TwitchAlerts took a 30% fee on a new, unreleased feature. While we initially did think about taking a cut on a brand new feature that was not even released yet, we decided not to. And this “no-fee” decision was announced to streamers several days before Athene put out his video, and had nothing to do with him. See this tweet from NickiTaylor showing we went free on March 9th (wednesday) before Athene posted this video on March 12th. Another example of slander and baseless accusations. About a dozen streamers tried this feature. Find us anyone that can show transaction logs that shows us taking a cut.
Undisclosed fees: Part of the pitch behind gamingforgood is that it supports more payment methods and lower fees. What is not fully disclosed is that when you try to actually withdraw your money from G2APay wallet (the payment service used by gamingforgood), you get hit with an extra 1% - 2% of fees of your entire balance. Other tipping platforms don’t have this extra charge on withdrawal. It is deceptive business practice to not be upfront and open about this. When you factor this in, gamingforgood actually has some of the highest fees of any donation platform (including tipeestream, imraising and others). Don’t believe me? Try to withdraw your money from G2A wallet and see what happens.
False marketshare claims: Athene that “EVERYONE is switching over to gamingforgood”, and that it is already “huge”. In reality very few streamers are actually using it. And many that have tried it have left due to feature/software/bug issues. Here’s a twitch marketshare analysis of the Top 2000 streamers on Twitch by donation system: TwitchAlerts - 72.3%, gamingforgood - 1.35%. Even TipeeStream (3.99%) is 3 times larger than gamingforgood.
False charity claims: Athene claims that they are the only ones really supporting charities and raising money for charities. This is simply untrue. While G4G has supported Save the Children (kudos, again), in the past 12 months Twitchalerts & Streampro have provided software, services or donation support for: Extra Life, Childs Play Charity, Game Changer Charity, St. Jude, AbleGamers, International Bipolar Foundation, Call of Duty Endowment, Special Effect, Cancer.Org, Mercy For animals, Doctors without Borders, Operation Supply Drop and others. Other donation platforms like ImRaising, TipeeStream and StreamTip have also worked with charities. G4G is not the only one.
Impersonated Reddit post: A Fake, impersonated reddit post was created by "TwitchAlertsOfficial" and claimed to announce a bunch of new things. We had nothing to do with this, and were quite shocked to come to work one morning and see a post impersonating to be us. The comments had half a dozen people directing folks to gamingforgood (see downvoted). This was reported to the /r/twitch mods, and they took the post down. At the time we weren’t sure who did this, but combined with everything else that followed (see below), there is strong circumstantial evidence. They wanted us to promise certain features in 3 days, fail to deliver (3 days!), and then G4G would offer the same features in that post.pending investigation
Viewbotting: Since gaming4good launched, around the same time, Athene’s twitch channel went from an average of 1000-1500 viewers to 8000. And its stayed at 8000, for 24 hours a day for over 2 weeks in March. Forsen, Reckful, Destiny and others correctly called this out as blatant viewbotting. Athene claims to not be doing it, and suggested TwitchAlerts may be behind this, but the only one benefiting is him personally and gamingforgood. Athene’s numbers have now magically reverted back to their historical average (1000-1500).pending investigation
Twitter Bots: An army of hacked twitter accounts or bots copied the abusive message "Fuck you, regards @twitchalerts" and messaged hundreds of streamers on twitter; examples here and here. The intent was clear: to abuse streamers and get people upset at twitchalerts, and introduce a new service. Here’s a partial list of the hundreds of twitter bots that are being used. pending investigation
We tried to stay patient and give Athene the benefit of the doubt. Since early Feb we tolerated this abuse and harassment without saying a word. But once our streamers and employees started getting targeted individually, we had to draw the line and say ENOUGH. We cannot let goons bully and harass our staff and our streamers, and neither should the twitch community. That is why we recently issued a cease-and-desist notice to gamingforgood and Athene. If we let this go, Athene will inevitably do this again to someone else, just as he has in the past with Poker and Russian bots, League, Warcraft and other communities.
In addition to harassment and deceptive marketing, there are other ongoing things we should call attention to related to Athene and gamingforgood:
Undisclosed Revshare: We have strong reasons to believe that G4G may be receiving undisclosed commission back from some of their payment processors that are bundled in with the payment fees. We were offered a similar deal, but have NOT taken it (cannot disclose details due to NDA). You cannot do this and tell streamers flatly that you are “not taking a fee”. This is a hidden charge for the streamer which is not being fully disclosed in the form of rev-share back to G4G from the payment processor. When you raise money for a charity, it is critical to disclose if you are receiving any form of commission from your partners. US charities and their agents are also required to disclose fully audited accounts. Where are yours?
Payments investigation: There is an ongoing investigation by a major payment gateway of the methods used by gamingforgood to charge fees and transfer money through unauthorized channels, potentially in violation of money-laundering laws in the US and Canada. Funds in similar cases in the past have gotten frozen, and we fear that it may happen to streamers using their service in the US. FinCen is the regulator that oversees MSBs in the US. More details will emerge in a few months. Consider this a PSA.
Just last year for Vulcun, through Kiva.org, we supported 2800 small businesses and created 5,000+ sustainable jobs through $500,000 in non-profit startup funding details here. I fully support the charitable work gamingforgood is trying to do - I’ve even made 2 donations personally to g4g. But helping a charity does not give you the license to engage in deceptive and illegal business practices.
If you’re going to be serious about supporting hundreds of thousands of streamers as we do, you have to run your organization professionally or it will fall apart. Software will break. Money will go missing. Streamers will be mad. You’ll have lawsuits and regulators. Running a professional software platform is very different from a stream full of drama and troll. Donation platforms have all been around for a few years and have peacefully co-existed. We have all competed fairly using new features, better support and lower prices. You are the exception: big on drama, little on substance.
That is all we are asking for in our cease-desist letter: just stop harassing us and our users. There are no monetary demands, no required apologies. Just stop harassing our streamers and employees, and we’ll all move on. For the sake of the gaming community Athene, please. Show your fans that you can take the high-road, be a real leader, and lead by example.
TL;DR: Some evidence for harassment, hacking, false accusations, and incomplete disclosure of fees by G4G/Athene.
sorry for bringing drama in /r/forsen guys - a lot of the g4g posts were here, and it seemed the right place to issue a response in an open-minded community.
edit: some claims are pending investigation of someone who's claiming to have done them here
