CSGO Lounge, which at one point ran the biggest skin betting platform in the world before it was shuttered on Aug. 16, is looking to refund any users whose skins were lost in the shutdown.
Roughly four months after the betting component of the site was removed—and it officially relaunched as an “entertainment and media” agency—CSGO Lounge and its parent company ESForce Holdings announced that any users that were unable to withdraw their skins from the site will be reimbursed.
On Jul. 10, Valve sent cease and desist letters to CSGO Lounge and its sister site Dota 2 Lounge, among others, asking the sites to stop their activities due to using Steam accounts for commercial purposes. Upon receiving the cease and desist letter from Valve, all bot accounts that were handling the payouts for the sites were banned. This meant users weren’t able to receive any of their unclaimed winnings, as the bot accounts had been rendered unusable.
As a result, ESForce Holdings and CSGO Lounge will begin refunding any users whose skins were stuck on any of the bot accounts. This process will, according to the press release, begin in March at the latest.
“We [ESForce/CSGO Lounge] are currently working on the technical side of the refund mechanism and legal aspects of the issue.”
After shutting down the betting component of its operation, CSGO Lounge released an update on Aug. 16 claiming that, “Lounge will continue as an e-Sports entertainment and information platform with new features to be released very soon.”
At the height of its popularity, CSGO Lounge received an excess of 38 million hits per month, and was believed to have handled more than $1 billion worth of skins in the first half of 2016, according to a research paper produced by Narus Advisors.
