CS2 players banned over scheme to trick ESL with fake text

ESL has disqualified Perseverance from the ESL Challenger League Season 48 and banned its entire CS2 roster for two months for lying to tournament administrators about trying to reschedule a match.

ESL issued the ruling on July 30, stating that the team “submitted false evidence to mislead the tournament administration in an effort to have an ESL Challenger League match rescheduled.”

According to an investigation by Dust2.us, the Perseverance players schemed to mislead ESL officials by providing false evidence of weather-related power issues in the area of one of Perseverance’s players to move the match to a later date.

The player, Cory ‘shutout’ Frymark, sent screenshots of a storm in his area from the Apple Weather app and a text supposedly sent from his power company saying there was “a high risk of power outages” in his area during the time of the match to a tournament official.

The screenshots, however, had some obvious flaws that led ESL to see through the scheme.

According to the report, the phone number used to send the alleged alert was the personal number of another Perseverance player, Gabriel ‘Gabe’ Shah. The alert from the supposed power company also misspelled experience as “expierence.”

Weather data from the Delaware area, where shutout is located, during July 18 also show much milder conditions than purported in the screenshot sent to the ESL official.

According to the report, the scheme’s goal was to push the July 18 matchup against Mythic back so the team could replace Chance ‘xaler’ Palmer with Nelvin ‘nooz’ Gonzalez in time for the game. Perseverance dropped xaler and signed nooz on July 24.

The Canadian esports organization announced on July 30 that it has dropped its CS2 roster and that it does “not condone the actions the team has done or taken.”

The banned players have not commented on the situation on social media.

This incident comes just months after a North American CS2 player was banned for stealing parts of computers belonging to Jake ‘Stewie2K’ Yip and Nikola ‘NiKo’ Kovač at IEM Dallas.