Twitch streamer catches follow-botting viewer red-handed

A Twitch streamer was rattled after he managed to catch one of his viewers appearing to follow-bot him while in the middle of a broadcast.

Viewer and follow bots on Twitch have been a major problem on the platform for quite some time. Basically, unsuspecting streamers see their channels bombarded with thousands of new followers overnight.

The problem, however, is that none of these followers are actually real and their channel growth is completely artificial.

Twitch has pledged to crack down on those responsible for the bottings in a new blog post, including potentially taking legal action if need be. Now, a streamer appears to have found one of the individuals responsible.

Australian streamer Empirrre was relaxing and listening to music with his viewers when suddenly, someone in his chat started making some perplexing comments.

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Pulling up the viewer’s chat logs, Empirrre noticed a trend with their comments. First, the viewer, wizdoesthings, contratuated the streamer on 30K followers. The viewer also claimed to be “blessin streamers out here.”

Then only 10 minutes later, the same viewer congratulated Empirrre for reaching 40,000 followers and accompanied his praise with a wink emoji.

“Wiz, why?!” the Aussie roared in disgust. “Is it you? Here’s the thing, dude, if it is you, you’re not doing anyone a favor!”

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While Twitch doesn’t punish streamers for being view or follow botted, the platform is removing plenty of fake accounts from the site.

“They’re fake. It’s not real. It’s not real success,” he added. “It’s fake. It’s weird numbers. It’s not anything.”

The viewbotter had a whopping 96K followers on their own channel, providing further evidence that they were botting. Eventually, the viewer even confessed, claiming that they could show the streamer how to remove the follows.

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“Dude, you understand Twitch is cracking down on this sh*t, right?” he asked. “You understand what’s going to happen, right?”

So far, the viewer’s channel is still online so Twitch doesn’t seem to have taken action yet, but the platform has expressed a strong commitment to fighting against bots.