Investigation: Perseverance's fake text message deception behind ECL ban

Today the NA CS2 community was shocked by ESL's announcement that Perseverance had been disqualified from ESL Challenger League Season 48, while five members of their now-former team: John "mds" Marin, Gabriel "Gabe" Shah, Collin "CoJoMo" Moren, Cory "shutout" Frymark, and Mark "CooperTrooper" Cooper, had also been banned from ESL FACEIT Group events for two months.

Within ESL's announcement, the tournament organizer were sparse on details, stating that the team had "submitted false evidence to mislead the tournament administration in an effort to have an ESL Challenger League match rescheduled." However, via an investigation by Dust2.us, new details have been revealed regarding the team's attempt to deceive the ESL Challenger League's admins in order to reschedule a July 18th match against Mythic.

Sources with intimate knowledge of the team tell Dust2.us that Perseverance aimed to falsify potential weather-related power issues at shutout's house in order to be granted an emergency reschedule of the aforementioned Mythic match. A source told Dust2.us that this attempt at subterfuge was undertaken in order to ensure the team would be able to play the BO1x2 versus Mythic with Nelvin "nooz" Gonzalez in place of Chance "xaler" Palmer, whom the team officially kicked on July 24th.

The source alleges that due to a variety of factors nooz would be unable to play with the team by July 18th, leading the lineup to fabricate the chance of a power outage in order to convince NA ECL admin Zyrus "Osodank" Bechstein to reschedule the match. The source shared a series of screenshots from the ECL Discord, which Dust2.us has confirmed to be legitimate, that show shutout attempting to convince Osodank of incoming inclement weather via an Apple Weather doppler radar, weather report, and a supposed text from shutout's "power company."

These screenshots reveal a number of issues with the team's alleged attempt at subterfuge. The most glaring of these being that shutout's "power company" seemingly misspelled "expierence" [sic] in their message to customers.

The phone number, blurred by Dust2.us for privacy reasons, used to send the so-called "alert" also appears to be Gabe's personal phone number. While Dust2.us was unable to contact the player by said number via a text message nor a phone call, a source showed Dust2.us that he had communicated with the same number multiple times for CS-related matters. Additionally, using a publicly available look-up website, the phone number was claimed to belong to a "Gabriel Shah".

Additionally, while circumstantial, weather data from nearby Wilmington Airport, Delaware, only around 50 miles away from shutout's location on Apple Weather, shows that from July 17th to July 18th there was only 0.73 inches of rain while wind speeds topped out at 13 Miles Per Hour (MPH) — conditions exceedingly unlikely to create a "high risk of power outages between 1am on July 18th and 1am July 19th," as the text message alleges.

Overall, these issues regarding the veracity of Perseverance's story of why they needed an emergency reschedule do not hold up to serious scrutiny, with similar scrutiny from ESL FACEIT Group leading to the bans being applied today.

Dust2.us attempted to reach out to the five banned individuals for comment regarding their alleged attempts to deceive ESL Challenger League admins, however none of them responded to a request for comment by the time of publication.

Editor's Note: shutout's location and hometown were obfuscated following publication of this article.