In the final chapter of the article series about the wild story of Aleksey ‘Yarabeu’ Kurlov, Dexerto’s Editor-at-Large, Richard Lewis, speaks with a team that was allegedly blackmailed by the self-proclaimed whistleblower.

You can read Part 1 of this article series, ‘The first contact’, here. Part 2, ‘Going down the rabbit hole’, can be found here. Part 3, ‘It’s a wonderful life’, can be found here. Part 4, More wild claims and ESIC’s response, can be found here.

It’s 2023 and we should probably accept that any notion of integrity, competitive or otherwise, in CS:GO is an oil-pipe dream. We start the year with a calendar predominantly funded by a combination of oil money, war criminals, and despotic regimes, with a side helping of functional Ponzi schemes. Tournament operators ignore their own rules to benefit their partners, multi-gaming organizations ignore their own values to benefit their bank accounts, and developers spend more time worrying about penalizing those that would bruise their egos than those that would cause harm to their subordinates.

For a brief period, we had a group in the form of ESIC that was at least trying to introduce the alien concept of accountability into an industry where lying and stealing are rewarded, and where failing upwards is all but guaranteed if you are fluent in American corporate bullshit. Their reputation is now mostly in tatters through a combination of constant attacks on their…