$500K bids for Pokimane gaming session were fueled by credit card fraud—and she’s ‘glad’ they were capped

It turns out those numbers in the hundreds of thousands of dollars vying for the chance to game with Pokimane weren’t all that they seemed, as confirmed by the streamer and CDawgVA, whose charity auction is offering the session.

Soon after the online bidding went live, bids for gaming sessions with streamers like Pokimane and Ironmouse skyrocketed into the hundreds of thousands, with Pokimane’s session racing to $500,000. Some of those bids seemed suspect, however, with names like Mark Cuban among the bidders, as well as usernames that contained hate speech and slurs. On July 15, CDawgVA confirmed that many of the sky-high bids were false bids via stolen credit cards and fake email accounts. “There’s nothing sadder you can fake in life than donating money to charity,” an understandably pissed CDawg said.

At time of writing, it appears Tiltify has managed to banish all of the fraudulent bids, which means the top bid for the gaming session now sits at $30,200—still a breathtaking amount of money to play video games with a person, but also more reasonable than half a million dollars.

Pokimane also commented on the situation, noting she was “kind of glad that [the bid] capped at half a million,” presumably not wanting the number to get even more out of hand and discourage actual bidders who were willing to pay their full bid for charity. “This is still an outrageous amount of money,” the streamer continued while looking at the new highest bid. And yeah, making five figures for charity by auctioning off one gaming session with a fan seems like it’s still pretty good work for the streamer.

All proceeds for CDawgVA’s auction go toward the Immune Deficiency Foundation, and the new adjusted totals for online bidding have almost eclipsed $100,000. Those numbers still have plenty of time to go up, with the live auction event being broadcast today on CDawgVA’s Twitch channel.