 It's like y'all can't leave me alone for one day. I'm out in LA, y'all never told me it was this beautiful out here. It's the first time I've been out of Toronto in the winter. The weather is straight here. Alright, listen up. There's a side of 2K that nobody really talks about. And there's a particular reason I don't talk about it or ever promote it. It's because left and right, however trustworthy you think the guy you're speaking to is, you're getting scammed. And unfortunately, just the way 2K is built, it's like this side of the 2K community just exists out of necessity. But then there's so much possibility for corruption. And then my name gets dragged into the mix. Bro, y'all see the spike? I can't enjoy a weekend, y'all. I can't just kick back for a weekend without being involved in some drama. Listen, man, I'm on the flight. I'm coming to LA and somebody tweets me and says, Yo agent, somebody is using your name to scam me. He's a badge grinder. That's what they told me. Excuse me? There's a particular reason I don't promote badge grinders on the channel. It's because they might do my badges properly. They might be straight with me and they might seem honest in the DMs. But no matter which way you put it, they could always scam the people that I could potentially direct towards them. So when y'all tell me, agent, who do you think who you recommend, bro? Who do you charge? Agent, who grinds your badges? Don't worry about it. All right, I have a story to tell y'all. Listen carefully. Did I say the view is phenomenal? Did I mention that? Okay, so last year I wanted a few players done because I was in the stage where I just finished up my tiny slasher in 2K17. It's my 6x6 post-scorer and I wanted to create some new players. Now, I can't sit there and grind for a couple weeks by myself. I wouldn't have time to create videos. And at the time, I was also in school. Y'all would rather see videos than me grinding 2K, believe me. So of course, I went to find a badge grinder. Now, the thing about badge grinders is they have access to your entire account. If they want, they could delete all your players one by one and you'll get f***ed over and they'll get away with it. Nothing happens to them because technically, according to the rule of law, 2K said that badge grinding is against the rules. Now, I'm assuming 2K knows how insane the amount of time it required to actually grind badges. So they let everybody do it on the low and they don't really say much, but it's technically against the rules. So you can't even hit up 2K support like, yo, I broke the rules. Help me out. So I hit up this badge grinder. He had some referrals from some YouTubers I was cool with. They were well over 200,000 subscribers. So I'm like, all right, cool. He should be trusted. Mistake number one, never trust referrals. First of all, I could just go on Google Chrome, inspect element, and then say, I could say LeBron, pull the referee to suck his... You see what I'm saying? You see what inspect element could do? So no matter which way you put it, if you see a tweet or whatever, there's no way you should take it on face value ever. Okay, that being said, let's move on. All right. So I hit up this guy. He created a few players for me, right? And I'm like, okay, he's straight. So I wanted to hit him up to create some more players for me. Now, the times he created players for me, he would say like a week and he'll get it done in three weeks, right? So off rip, I'm paying the guy and he's coming in late with all his work. And he'll always come up with a new excuse for why it's late. But I'm a nice guy, right? I'm a very forgiving dude, bro. So I said, it's all good. First of all, at the end of the day, the characters I just wanted to create content with. So it wasn't really holding me back. It was holding back the content that you would end up seeing. So I completed those two players. He asked for a shout-out. So in one of my YouTube videos, I naively gave him a shout-out. Mistake number one. Or was it mistake number two? It could have been three, four, five, and six because that's the worst possible move I could have done. So I shout him out, which means hundreds and probably thousands of people hitting this guy up saying, yo, help me with my badges. He's one person. So what do you think he does? He hits up his friends. Says, yo, I'm about to start this badge grinding business now because agent sent all these guys to me. And what happened next, bro, it makes me look so bad. A few weeks later, time goes by. I get messages from a bunch of subscribers saying, yo, agent, that guy you sent us to scammed us out of our money. So I hit him up. I'm like, yo, what the fuck are they talking about? You better not be scamming nobody. And he says, no, one of my friends did the scam. And that was helping me with the badge. So it wasn't really me. It was one of my friends. He gave this whole sob story and immediately my spidey senses is tingling. This is where I was at in my life. I was at the point where I knew people were trying to take advantage of me because of the attention I had, but I was too nice to say no a lot of the times. So I had this dilemma. I can help this guy out because what he asked me for was crazy. He said, agent, can you bail me out? Give me the $400 that my boys scam these people for and I'll repay the subscribers. So I'm like, bro, it's for the subscribers. It had nothing to do with me. I finished my role, bro. I don't want to have to be involved in this scandal, but it's my subscribers. I can't let these people down. So I gave him the money. He paid the subscribers back and I told him that and he said, yo, I'll do anything for you. So I told him, I bet make three players for me. And at the time that's a bargain, right? I'm telling him to make three players for $400. The race that was going in 2K17, I could have got it for a lot cheaper, but I was a nice guy. I could ask for four or five and he probably still would have said yes. Right. Okay. Moving forward. I told myself when I gave him that money, that no matter what, if I got burned in this specific situation, this was the last time I was ever going to be nice for anybody because it's like sometimes you're nice and people just take advantage of you and you're like, do you know I don't have to be nice? Do you know I could not do none of this? And so I was like, that's my that's, that's how I was feeling, bro. I get burned. I'm not doing shit for anybody. That's not willing to help me out. Period. And in my mind, I'm like, this is not a smart decision, but then on my other mind, I was like, bro, let's give this guy a chance. He hasn't, he hasn't done me nothing wrong yet. Aside from, of course, putting me in the scandal. So time goes on. I hit this guy up. So I told him he's going to have to do three players for me. One of them was a point forward. So if you guys remember, you're on my YouTube channel last year. I created a 6, 10 point forward, but it never finished grinding because the badge grinder told me it was going to take a couple weeks. It took a month. It took a month and a half pushing a month and a half. And I was like, damn, yo, you're never going to finish this player, let alone the two other players you promised me. That's the thing, yo, regardless of what you do in business, never pay upfront if you don't have to. All right. In this situation, I did it for my subscribers, but in many situations, he no longer had an incentive to work hard because I mean, I could have destroyed his reputation one. Actually, he did have an incentive. He was just stupid. So the point forward never ended up being complete. I never really created content with him. I'd never got any of the two other characters. What happened next is piss me off. So I'm going to calm down by taking a look at the city. Kind of look nice. Yeah, I'm not going to lie to you, bro. Okay. So here's what happened. I'm chilling. I'm, look, look, look, look. I'm kicked back like this. I'm trying to be so comfortable, bro. I'm studying for my exam. I have the next day. I pull out my phone. It says I have a PlayStation security alert. Two minutes later, my phone rings notification. It says your password has been changed. Only person-wise access to that is the badge grinder and me. And I was studying. Only one person that could have been. Not only was I not ready for the exam the next day, but now I have to spend time troubleshooting some bull-issue. I hit a PlayStation support immediately. They take forever to get back to me. And I'm scrambling to change my password. Luckily, he didn't know my security questions. So I was able to re-change the password that he changed to something else. Even though I re-changed the password, I kept getting signed out of PlayStation. So I would be on my account and it would sign me out and say someone else has logged in. I don't know how he did it because I changed the password. I kept getting logged out and so I'm on the phone with people that I think know the answer to my problem. I'm like, how do I get this guy off my account? It has to be him. Actually, he was in my mentions. One of the badge grinders friends showed me DMs of my badge grinder giving him details to my account saying, yo, could you grind his account for me? So now he's sharing my account information with other people. The other person happened to be a subscriber. He was spamming it. So I screenshotted all of it in case he deleted the tweets afterwards. I just had them up ready, locked and loaded. So left happens, right happens. And at the end of the day, I cut off ties with this guy. And I contemplated making a video warning people don't mess with badge grinders because in many situations, they'll never mess with my account because I could destroy their reputation, right? All that they worked for. And there's probably some trustworthy ones out there. But in majority, unless it's someone that you know and trust with your account, they could go and delete your players, bro. They could go in and do some real damage, spend all your VC if they wanted to. You got to be super sure who you're trusting. And so I gave this guy $400. He made a promise to me he was going to build my characters. Next thing you know, he betrays my trust, gives a password and he's begging for my forgiveness. So I'm furious and I'm so close to making a video, bro. And I remember like, I'm like, let me, let me just relax and forgive this guy. It's not worth the video. So tell me why I was on my flight here, right? And I'm looking at my mentions and someone goes, the same badge grinder from last year who I forgave is taking screenshots of past DMs and they weren't even DM supporting him. I told him my spidey senses is tingling, bro. But for some reason I trust you. So I told you what I said. I had some hope for this guy. But in the back of my mind, I'm like, something could go wrong. And so next thing you know, subscribers is telling me that he's using my name as a reference to grind other people's badges so he could scam them. So I'm gonna leave his Twitter in the description. What you guys do with it is your business. But more importantly, here's the lesson I learned from all of that. If someone's not willing to do for you what you're about to do for them, don't do it. There's plenty of times where people say, ask me for money or whatever the case is. And I just asked myself, if I was asking them for money, what would their response be? And if the response is yeah, then I'm willing to give it to them. And you know, whether it's borrowing or a gift or in a troublesome situation, whatever it is, that's how I live everything now. I don't even make tough decisions no more. I just flip the script. Would you do that for me at the end of the day? And if the answer is yes, I'll help you out. But that's what I learned that day. Don't trust the badge grinder just because left to right period said that they're cool. There's some cool badge grinders I've talked to but that doesn't mean the whole team that grinds badges for them is trustworthy. And believe me, if they see an opportunity to scam you and get away with it, there are selfish people who are going to do it. They don't care about you. They just want to make money at the end of the day. I mean, it's kind of sad this all exists. At the end of the day, we kind of just want to upgrade our player without sitting there forever just grinding mindlessly to get badges. Luckily this year, we can grind them on the Prime in the My Park so it's not as brutal. But in most situations, you'd want them grinded before you hop on and play any of those Park or Pro-Am competitive. So that's where I'm at, man. I'm flying to LA. I look at my phone and I see this piece of shit individual who I let go last year because I had it in my heart to not destroy him. Come back and try and use my name to scam my subscribers. If that's not some of the scumiest shit you've ever seen, don't even start. Anyway, I'm out in LA. Honestly, it's been a great time here. I was out for a Facebook event, man. I'm going to talk a little bit more about that later. Can you imagine, like, do you see the weather in the winter? I can, it's crazy, man. Hey, listen up, man. I'm warning you now. If you mess with a badge grinder and get burned, it's your fault. It's never going to be me promoting any badge grinder. Trust me, they're all trying to offer me money to put a little header at the start of my videos. I'm not doing it. Because forget how I look when it turns on me, but I want to be the reason that the people supporting me get scammed. Badge grinding is useful for me. And it is probably useful for you. A lot of people don't have time to sit there and do that. But trust me, you're going to want a guy on your account who you trust that won't do nothing. You know, when I started my sharpshooter and a little bit of my play shooter, I just asked Too Cool to hop on that account when he had free time and grind the badges and I just paid him. Because I could trust Too Cool with my account and know that nothing will go wrong. So unless you have someone like that, man, you're taking a risk and don't say I didn't tell you. That's all I'm saying. If you enjoyed, drop a like. Subscribe if you guys are new. I'm just saying that guy's Twitter's in the description. I'm not telling you to do anything with it. I'm just saying it's in there. I'm out. Peace.