Drake has been accused of transferring millions of dollars through a gambling website to buy fake Spotify streams from an Australian broker in a new lawsuit alleging a racketeering conspiracy.
Controversial streamer Adin Ross, who has collaborated with Drake, as well as U.S. President Donald Trump and white nationalist Nick Fuentes, is also accused in the class action suit, which says Drake and Ross broke U.S. racketeering laws.
The lawsuit, filed in Virginia on New Year’s Eve by two users of the online casino Stake.us, alleges Drake and Ross used Stake’s tipping feature to transfer money — including as much as $100,000 at once — to each other and to Australian George Nguyen.
Nguyen then used the money in part to pay for bots to artificially inflate Drake’s play counts across streaming platforms, including Spotify, the suit alleges.
“This manipulation has suppressed authentic artists and narrowed consumers’ access to legitimate content,” the suit says.
A representative for Drake declined to comment. Nguyen and representatives for Stake and Ross did not respond to a request for comment.
In 2023, the Financial Times reported Drake is paid $100 million a year to promote Stake, and he regularly posts and streams about the cryptocurrency-based platform. Its tipping feature, the lawsuit alleges, is an “unlimited and wholly unregulated money transmitter that appears to exist outside the oversight of any financial regulator.”
Stake, which is based in Curaçao, is not an approved online gambling operator in Ontario, although the company said it planned to launch here in 2025.
After receiving cryptocurrency from Drake or Ross, Nguyen — going by the online alias “Grand Wizard,” among others — then pays for bots and other amplification strategies to boost Drake’s stream counts, according to the lawsuit
The operation, the suit says, has been ongoing since at least 2022.
It’s not the first time Drake has been entangled in a fake streams suit. In November, an American rapper accused the Torontonian of having a “substantial” number of fake streams from a sprawling bot network.
