Canadian guy criminally charged for Twitch chat spamming

Twitch chat has been a potential source of discomfort to some people, but this guy’s punishment goes far beyond a simple block from sending messages

A 20-year-old Canadian guy by the name of Brandan Lukus Apple, a British Columbia resident, is being charged with criminal mischief for repeatedly spamming Twitch with hateful messages using a spam service called ChatSurge to overwhelm more than 1,000 Twitch channels with at least 150,000 messages.

Apple is now facing a criminal mischief charge for “willfully causing multiple repetitive messages to be transmitted [through Twitch],” according to reports. A separate civil order from the BC Supreme Court will prevent him from using, creating, or selling “any robot, bot, crawler, spider, blacklisting software, or other software” used to spam Twitch.

Apple’s largest attack on Twitch came between February and May of 2017 when he used the service to spam racistcomments in the Twitch chat of thousands of users. The criminal mischief charge is in relation to that attack. In the BC Supreme Court, Twitch employees said they spent 300 hours tracking down Apple and his connection to the onslaught of hate. Twitch declined to comment to Dot Esports when asked about the case.

The recent developments shows that Twitch was serious about their promises made in May 2016, where they pledged to help combat harassment on the service after a Hearthstone pro faced a deluge of racist comments in chat.