Oliwer clearly remembers the day he came to school and told his friends that he had come up with a new way to cheat other players on their weapon “skins”.
– I was completely excited and showed what cool skins I had gotten hold of.
He had come up with a three-party arrangement. He tricked two innocent people into thinking they were dealing with each other, when in fact one of them sent him the money.
The scams grew along with an incipient gambling addiction, and eventually he had it as a full-time occupation. Sometimes he acted as a “fake intermediary” where he pretended to be two people, both the buyer and the intermediary, under different fake Facebook identities.
– I had several chat conversations going under different names at the same time, it was enough for one to tap and you had a big paycheck.
Few are caught
SVT Nyheter’s investigation shows that very few are caught for this kind of fraud and theft. Nevertheless, anyone familiar with the trade in skins is clear that there is a large and growing criminal activity in the market.
– The police do nothing, says Mikael Jägare, who runs a large forum for trade in skins for Counterstrike. And the politicians make it too difficult for the young people who want to be honest to start real business operations where this can be managed properly.
Played it all away
Only as an adult was Oliwer finally arrested and convicted of money laundering and fraud, among other things. He was convicted when he accepted a payment of 120,000 from a criminal contact, then laundered the money by buying “skins” for half. He got to keep the rest.
Today, he has gambled away everything he has pulled in over the years as a con artist. He has been treated for his gambling addiction, and has stopped the fraud, he says.
He knows he cheated children, sometimes out of their entire tuition fees. Today he wishes someone had stopped earlier.
– If the police had caught me, then I might not have developed my gambling addiction so much.