00:00Steak.com is the biggest crypto casino in the world,
00:03and it got there in part thanks to viral videos
00:06by some of the world's biggest influencers.
00:08Come on, Cheese! Seven!
00:10Oh!
00:12What?
00:13Oh, yeah!
00:15Get those clips viral, you know, and just have a few of them
00:18with the Steak logo really clear and really big.
00:20People had suspected for a long time
00:22that some of the influencers advertising Steak
00:25were winning maybe a little bit more often
00:27than the average person.
00:29But we actually did the math,
00:30and what we found was pretty shocking.
00:35Steak.com online is inescapable. It's everywhere.
00:39But the most important part of its marketing
00:42is its use of influencers and its use of social media.
00:46These streamers are betting cartoon sums of money
00:49on Steak's slot games.
00:50Dude's just chilling with $9.7 million in his account.
00:54Steak also pays a thousands-strong group of contractors
00:58to clip videos from these live streams
01:01and scatter them across the internet.
01:0315 real, finally!
01:05These videos are pretty overwhelming.
01:07Oh, my God!
01:09Send it!
01:10It's a lot of just, like, bright colors and lights
01:13and numbers going everywhere.
01:14They move very quickly.
01:15It's definitely a sensory overload.
01:18Boom!
01:18The biggest name Steak has in its influencer stable
01:22is the rapper Drake.
01:24He plays slots.
01:24He plays roulette, anything you can imagine.
01:27When he's live streaming, it's this huge event, big production.
01:30He'll bring in guest stars.
01:32But in addition to Drake,
01:34Steak has tapped a lot of famous gaming influencers.
01:37Some of the top people gaming there were Aiden Ross, XQC, Rostine, Trainwreck.
01:44These gaming influencers together have tens of millions of followers across social media.
01:50I interviewed young people whose favorite live streamers switched from video games
01:54to crypto gambling and it said that they had become addicted and lost lots of money,
02:00including for some of their life savings.
02:01In 2022, Twitch, which is owned by Amazon, banned crypto gambling.
02:06After that happened, Steak's founders launched their own live streaming website, Kik.
02:11Because of Steak's huge cultural footprint online,
02:14we really wanted to investigate whether what people see is what's actually happening.
02:20We interviewed influencers, agents, managers, gambling experts, former Steak employees,
02:27and of course, people who had lost significant sums of money gambling on Steak.com.
02:32We found that some streamers were playing with money that was deposited
02:35into their accounts by the house.
02:37In addition, we found that some streamers, including Drake,
02:41were winning at a higher rate than the average person.
02:44Hold on, how much is that?
02:46$1,200.
02:47We analyzed 500 hours of live slots on Steak.com by 25 different streamers.
02:52What we found was that Drake won four times more often than other streamers when he played games
02:58that were owned by Steak's parent company.
03:00When Drake was playing slots that weren't owned by Steak's parent company,
03:04he actually had the same win rate as everybody else.
03:08Crypto casinos are legal in certain countries like Brazil and Canada,
03:13but in other jurisdictions, crypto gambling is banned.
03:17Some users in jurisdictions where Steak is banned say they use software that actually
03:21masks their real location so that they can access the website.
03:25Steak's headquarters is in Australia,
03:27but its gambling license is actually registered to a small office in Curacao.
03:32Curacao is a notoriously friendly jurisdiction for crypto casinos.
03:36Steak is under increasing scrutiny.
03:38Recently, lawsuits have been filed against Steak that mention the specific influencers
03:42Drake and Aiden Ross.
03:44According to these complaints,
03:46they've participated in advertising in a legal casino in the U.S.
04:23Alex H.
04:23Alex H.
04:23Alex H.
Comments