REAL AND FAKE COIN-PUSHER VIDEOS

 

I decided to do something ridiculous that cost a whole bunch of money. So I bought a coin pusher.

Coin pushers are amusement games filled with coins and sometimes prizes (including cash). Players drop coins of their own into the machine and onto a platform that constantly moves backward and forward. The aim is to set off a chain reaction that will push coins or prizes off a second, stationary platform and into a payout tray below. Although the machines are legal under federal law, coin pushers that offer cash prizes are outlawed in a number of states.

Owning their own coin pusher, of course, meant John and Cheri had to stock it themselves. And winning their own money over and over again got boring quickly. So in August 2020, the couple decided to launch a YouTube channel to make their new hobby more exciting. That channel — We Play You Win, which has more than 11,000 subscribers — is one of many in YouTube's coin-pushing niche, which can attract millions of views each week.

Some vloggers in the space tout huge buy-ins, the amount one supposedly needs to put in to play high-reward machines, and even bigger wins. For instance, there's this credulity-straining video, which purportedly shows the creator winning $10.8 million on a $2 million buy-in machine.

John and Cheri's channel is far more humble and far more believable: They do not claim to be winning big. We said, ‘No, we're going to do something different,' says John, a 40-year-old software engineer who has since found a new job in his field. Instead, they make their live streams interactive, offering small prizes like whoopee cushions to viewers who correctly predict the end results of their games.

Cheri says she's irked when she sees people gravitating toward coin-pusher videos advertising things like a $500,000 Buy in! and TOTAL PROFIT. You want to tell them, ‘Look, the emperor has no clothes, she says. They're just scamming you. Don't go over there!'

Critics allege that a number of popular coin-pushing vloggers are in fact operating out of their own homes, using their own coin pushers — without revealing the truth to their audiences. These creators will in turn ask their followers to fund their gambling by donating to them on YouTube live streams or by joining their Patreons.

It ruins it for people who are trying to be honest, says Matt Magnone, a 35-year-old full-time arcade vlogger from Pennsylvania who has three million followers across his YouTube and TikTok channels. You get these few bad apples who stage things, and then when the rest of us win prizes legitimately, we get questioned for it.

Although the coin-pushing vloggers Input spoke to are reluctant to name names, mostly because they don't want to get swept up in petty YouTube drama, they say that bad actors are easy to suss out. The way that you can spot that someone's fake, other than if they claim to operate in a state where it is clearly illegal, is the noise, says Cheri. Videos by coin pushers like Dalton's Garage and A&V Coin Pusher both share strikingly similar background noises, which appear to be a loop of generic casino sounds.

Another sign that something is amiss, says Cheri, is when vloggers don't show winnings actually coming out of the machine.

Ultimately, the couple just want people to know that much of what they're watching isn't real, so they don't end up being separated from their money by scammers. If there were really places where you could play these magical [high-reward] coin pushers, it would be mobbed. There'd be information all over Reddit — but there isn't any, says John. The internet doesn't keep secrets, you know? It just doesn't.

To read the complete article, see:
YouTube coin-pusher videos are huge. But what's real and what's fake? (https://www.inputmag.com/culture/coin-pusher-machine-youtube-videos-fakes-scams)

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