A 20-year-old Canadian man is being charged with criminal mischief for repeatedly spamming Twitch with hateful messages.
Brandan Lukus Apple, a British Columbia resident, used a spam service called ChatSurge to overwhelm more than 1,000 Twitch channels with at least 150,000 messages, Twitch said in a court filing. Apple is now facing a criminal mischief charge for “willfully causing multiple repetitive messages to be transmitted [through Twitch],” according to CBC News.
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, according to CBC News.
Apple’s largest attack on Twitch came between February and May of 2017 when he used the service to spam racist and homophobic comments in the Twitch chat of thousands of users. The criminal mischief charge is in relation to that attack. Twitch’s civil action was filed in April in hopes of preventing Apple from using the service. Apple has not yet entered a plea.
In the BC Supreme Court, Twitch employees said they spent 300 hours tracking down Apple and his connection to the onslaught of hate, according to CBC News. Twitch declined to comment to Dot Esports when asked about the case.
Twitch chat is often home for harassment, with individual streamers tasked with moderating their own communities. In May 2016, Twitch pledged to help combat harassment on the service after a Hearthstone pro faced a deluge of racist comments in chat.
H/T Motherboard
