Twitch Spammer Facing Up to 10 Years in Prison for Attack on Streamers

Brandon Apple is now facing up to ten years in prison for his crusade against Twitch streamers that launched last year. For his constant harassment against popular streamers, CBC is reporting that he is facing charges including "mischief in relation to computer data" in regards to using spam bots to flood toxic messages.

Apple is also facing a civil order restricting him from creating and/or selling "any robot, bot, crawler, spider, blacklisting software or other software" with the intent to harass streamers. You can't make this up. That's an actual thing.

Also among his charges, British Columbia Supreme Court has revealed other details involving a civil suit against Mr. Apple regarding over 1000 Twitch channels being targeted by his attack creating a whopping 15,000 plus messages posted on average every 34 minutes. One report even states that some messages, depending on the channel, saw as frequent as 600 instances per minute.

As reported by PC Gamer, there was even a petition filed amidst all of this mess in order to identify the source of grief citing that the material many were facing included "racism, homophobia, sexual harassment, links to shock imagery, false implications of view-botting and soliciting child sex exploitation material." This eventually led to Twitch being able to trace where the material was coming from, back to a site called catsurge.net which appears to be lead by Apple himself.

Apple, at this time, is facing up to 10 years in prison by the Canadian Criminal Code. With the gaming community under a heavy spotlight due to the recent swatting incident that led to an innocent man's death, it would not be an unfair assumption to place expectations on the higher end of the punishment spectrum. As unfortunate as it may be, the darker sides to some of these "harmless" pranks are showing us that there can be unintended consequences. Though this spamming scandal has not resulted in more dire consequences, that we know of, it is still a federal violation and Apple will be tried as such.

At this time, Apple has not entered a plea in the face of these charges as they have not been proven in the court of law as of yet. His next court appearance is scheduled for February.