This alone should be enough to prove their innocence but as most people know, these numbers can be faked by buying a bot and a quick Google search will show you, that it is possible to buy up to 5.000 bots for as cheap as $50. There is no real indication of such fraud on Twitter but their Facebook page is in my eyes very sketchy.
Upgrade.gg has more than 5.000 followers and likes which is not too bad but the weird thing here, is the fact that most of their posts get only around 5 to 50 likes – Not a very high number compared to the other numbers as shown above. I believe this is a clear indicator but it is not possible to prove and they have the right to be seen as innocent unless proven otherwise. This should also be a reminder when checking other services as this is, as a matter of fact, a pretty big problem nowadays.
A quick check on the administrator of their official Steam group will show that he is also the admin of CSGOFireWheel.com’s official group. This website has gotten pretty bad reviews, accusations of scamming users and lots of other bad things happening to it, it is certainly not ideal that he is so heavy linked together with that brand and it is indeed a bit worrying.
The domain name scores pretty okay on scam alerting tools like Scamalert where they rank roughly around most other Counter Strike GO skin based gambling platforms. It does not show that Upgrade.gg is legit, as this platform is pretty new to get a negative rating on such scam tools.
Some things when clicking around on the website which I found a bit annoying is that you cannot check the Steam profiles of the winners to validate that they did indeed get the skins. I am almost 100 % sure that you will get your winnings but I am a bit worried they might do fake upgrades themselves to promote their business.
Under the history tab, it clearly states that all past upgrades can be viewed and verified however this is not the truth. You cannot click on the user’s logo, neither have any sort of a validation system with a hash equation.
The other thing is, that back in February, they promoted themselves by introducing their users to the “Challenges” and said everyone could earn up to $10. To this date, there have been no such challenges however it still says on their website “Get up to $10 free!”.
All these small incidents or weak accusations add up and it is hard not to believe Upgrade.gg is not currently using or never has been using fake promotion to maximize their traffic and thereby profit.
Is Upgrade.gg legit? Vote!
You can use our Upgrade.gg code CSGONINJA and it will provide you with a bonus of 100 coins which will be added to our balance after your first successful deal on the website. The 100 coins are worth around 10 cents and can be used in the shop called “Restock”.
Another way to earn free coins is by simply playing on Upgrade.gg as they will reward you with 2 % of the value of a successful upgrade and only 1 % of a failed attempt to upgrade your item. This bonus will also be paid in the same coins as our promotional code rewards you with and can be spent only in the “Restock” section too.
Next up are the daily giveaways that vary a lot in prize pools. These are some days only a Minimal Wear USP-S Orion while there currently is a huge Karambit Tiger Tooth giveaway, keyword here is that they are all free to enter and it usually only requires you to follow and retweet them on Twitter to enter. Their supposedly challenges are meant to award you with up to $11 however when going to the challenge section, there simply are no actions to perform and no rewards to achieve.
In some way, you could argue that the housing edge is negative because they pay you a certain percentage of everything you play for. This bonus, however, is countered by very bad odds that will secure high and steady profit percentage per $ played with.
If you look at the 4 various multipliers 1.5, 2, 5 and 10 you will quickly see that everyone only gets paid back 90 cents per $1 spent which means they have a 100:90 ratio for users and will, therefore, profit 10 % of everything spent on this website.
There is no real unique feature when visiting Upgrade.gg as the template and design is pretty much a rip-off from some of the more popular upgrading services. It has the basic upgrade a skin game and a live counter to the left showing you all currently successfully upgraded skins done by other users. Had the challenges been up live, these would certainly be something new but unfortunately this is not the case.
Pros
– You will be awarded for playing
Cons
– Possible fake promotions
– Their challenges are unavailable
– Bad odds
– Possible fake wins