The Man Who Stole his Family’s Life Savings to Donate to a Twitch Streamer

You read the title correctly, a Chinese man was revealed to have donated a grand total of $550,000 to a single twitch streamer over the span of 2024. This money was obtained in various ways, most notably from using his family’s life savings and also theft. Why? The reasoning is rather unorthodox, but the man whose surname is Hong donated all this money solely in the hopes that this twitch streamer would call him “brother”. It is perplexing to say the least that such an unusual motive drove Hong to commit crimes, starve himself, and seemingly take any length he can to reach this goal. Hong became obsessed with this unidentified twitch streamer at the beginning of 2024. This modern far-fetched situation may provide a greater insight into the direction our society is heading and perhaps a warning sign as to what the future may look like.

During 2024 when Hong was obsessed with this particular twitch streamer, he took roughly 40% of the money in his family’s savings account and used every dollar of it to donate to the twitch streamer. Twitch is a platform where influencers are free to live stream content for fans and usually do so routinely. Viewers can watch streams for free and may choose to voluntarily donate money with a short message to support the twitch streamer. Hong took this feature to the extreme and perhaps the most depressing part is that even as of today, the twitch streamer in question still has not fulfilled Hong’s request by saying “brother”.

After Hong stole money from his family’s life savings his access to the savings became restricted. Hong then resorted to stealing copper and then selling it to recycling stations. This was possible for Hong because he worked in a hardware industry which made access to copper more possible for him. It did not take long for the factory to notice a chunk of materials missing and notified police on October 15. Almost immediately after the investigation began Hong turned himself in. Hong confessed to at least 40 separate copper thefts.

Delving deeper into Hong’s motive, he said that he did not even care to meet the twitch streamer in person or anything, he only wanted to hear her say the one word. Hong truly did use every dollar he stole to the streamer because he claimed to live off of steamed buns as his only food source since he had no money leftover for anything else. No further explanation is provided as to whether Hong was so determined to hear the streamer say this one word out of a place coming from a fetish, result of prior traumas, or a mix of those reasons. Either way, to dedicate one’s life to living parasocially through watching a streamer and desperately sending massive donations to make them say something, are signs of serious loneliness.

Hong’s case is a bizarre one but is hopefully not one that becomes more common in the near future. As we further advance with technology and life is supposed to be as easy as it’s ever been, rates of loneliness and depression are as high as ever as well. Somehow with an exponentially increasing population on earth more people are feeling lonely which leads to unhealthy attachments to online relationships and social media. Specifically, streaming addiction is a rising problem. The normalization of instant satisfaction and appeal to the brain’s reward system is the cause of how streaming addiction begins. Dopamine release is comparable to receiving a “high” from drugs, it is highly addictive and in worst cases this can turn into an obsession. Although most people will likely never resort to stealing family savings and copper to fund a twitch streamer they have never personally met, the importance of human connection and avoidance of living chronically online can be taken away from Hong’s story.