Canadian Man Accused Of Mass Twitch Spamming Faces Criminal Charges

Canadian Man Accused Of Mass Twitch Spamming Faces Criminal Charges

A Canadian man is facing federal charges after allegedly flooding over 1000 Twitch channels with 150,000 spam messages early last year. The messages, which included racial and antisemitic slurs, spurred the British Columbian supreme court to issue a criminal charge for “mischief in relation to computer data” in early December, CBC reports. He could face up to 10 years in prison.

A screenshot from Twitch streamer Mstym’s channel, which CBC reports was affected by the ChatSurge software

In February and March 2017, 20-year-old Brandan Apple allegedly used the Twitch spam service ChatSurge to send offensive messages to Twitch streamers. ChatSurge purports to “flood, destroy or simply demolish any Twitch.tv chatroom,” a tutorial video explains.

After the attack, Twitch filed a court order to determine Apple’s identity. The order details some of the egregious messages sent by the chatbot, including “Death to all jews Death to all jews,” “Allah hates Gays KappaPride,” and “We wanna see gameplay not those big jugs.” Some messages linked to sexual content including children. Twitch’s court filing alleges that, at points, Apple was sending up to 700 messages a minute.

Twitch found Apple after petitioning the British Columbian supreme court to put pressure on sites such as CloudFlare and Whois Privacy, which Apple is said to have used on his spamming sprees. Employees at Twitch had previously spent nearly 200 hours tracking him down, Twitch’s court filing says.

CBC reports that Apple has not filed a defence or a plea. In addition to the criminal charge, the Canadian supreme court last year issued an order that prevents Apple from making or sharing bots, crawlers, robots or other harmful software intended to muck up Twitch channels.


The Cheapest NBN 1000 Plans

Looking to bump up your internet connection and save a few bucks? Here are the cheapest plans available.

At Kotaku, we independently select and write about stuff we love and think you'll like too. We have affiliate and advertising partnerships, which means we may collect a share of sales or other compensation from the links on this page. BTW – prices are accurate and items in stock at the time of posting.

Comments


13 responses to “Canadian Man Accused Of Mass Twitch Spamming Faces Criminal Charges”