Twitch streamer Marcel “MontanaBlack” Eris (35) has been indulging in his new hobby for almost half a year: opening rows of boxes in CS:GO. However, Steam has now temporarily blocked the streamer’s account.
What’s the deal with the lock? As announced on Discord on July 18, 2023, a Steam account was banned by MontanaBlack. Items worth more than $62,000 are said to have been on the account at the time.
However, the ban was lifted 6 hours later (via Twitter). Nevertheless, the news should have given the streamer at least a brief shock. Because although it was only a community ban and not the dreaded VAC ban, such a ban has an impact on the account.
What happens with a community ban? Steam users who have received such a ban will be locked out of all community features. In addition to forums and comments, this also includes the Steam market.
Users are excluded from trading. The items on the affected account thus become effectively worthless.
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Ban could be related to skin gambling
What’s behind the ban? Officially, no reason for the temporary ban is known. So it may well have been a wrongly issued ban.
However, there are indications that the ban could be related to using a website to gamble for CS:GO skins.
Valve announced in May that it intends to take stricter action against gambling in the future. Any player whose IP address is associated with a third-party skin gambling site could be banned from Steam (via Esports Illustrated).
The website “CSGORoll” in particular was criticized after a competing site made allegations against it:
At the end of June, Valve then took action against 40 traders and is said to have made skins worth $2 million worthless.
MontanaBlack has now reportedly been banned along with “a handful of other gambling-related accounts” (via Twitter). He had used CSGORoll in his streams and probably gambled over the site and traded skins.
So the streamer got off easy this time, but it remains to be seen how the situation develops further. If Valve is serious about cracking down on gambling, more bans could follow.
The 35-year-old had only recently announced how much money he had invested in Counter-Strike in just 5 months. MontanaBlack probably didn’t want to know that exactly:
Twitch: MontanaBlack shows how much money he spent on CS:GO in 5 months and can’t look himself