Posted in: Games, Twitch, Video Games | Tagged: HRL, Twitch

Canadian Twitch User May Face Prison Time for Spamming

Published Wed, 17 Jan 2018 16:45:41 -0600

The lesson to be learned from today's story is that if you're going to spam Twitch, you better be ready to face the consequences beyond banning. The CBC is reporting that a British Columbia resident known as Brandan Lukus Apple has been charged with "mischief in relation to computer data" and has been slapped with a restraining order preventing them from "any robot, bot, crawler, spider, blacklisting software or other software" against Twitch. Apple was traced after the B.C. Supreme Court forced ChatSurge.net to release his IP address and allow them to trace where all the spam was coming from.

Why was it so important to bust this one particular spammer? According to court documents, he is responsible for mass spamming 150,000 messages to over 1,000 channels. And it wasn't just random messages sent to slow down and kill streams that were in progress, these messages included racist, homophobic, and other harassing comments that were pretty much tailored to whomever he decided to target that particular evening, which makes the court's official documentation of "wilfully causing multiple repetitive messages to be transmitted" seem a bit tame.

Twitch claims that they spent over 300 hours of employees time tracking down and stopping this one individual. His court appearance is set for sometime in February, but no plea has been entered yet. If convicted, under the Criminal Code of Canada, he could serve up to 10 years in prison.

Short version, kids: Stop spamming Twitch, because they are hunting people down.

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