Tokyogurl: The star who faked her career and set women’s esports back

Jack Stewart, Senior Editor

Last Updated: 08/01/2026

At the end of 2025, Warasin ‘Tokyugurl’ Naraphat got caught in one of the biggest scandals in esports history.

The Arena of Valor esports pro was caught cheating while representing Thailand in the Southeast Asian Games (SEA Games).

Unlike most cheating cases, she wasn’t caught downloading mods or talking to match-fixers like suspended Valorant pro Seungmin ‘Ban’ Oh.

Instead, she was caught sharing a Discord screen and having somebody else play for her. Tokyogurl’s entire career was a lie.

Tokyogurl had built up quite a strong following through streaming and was regularly competing with Talon Esports.

Talon Esports has since fallen from grace after payment issues despite a partnership with one of the world’s biggest football clubs, Paris Saint-Germain (PSG).

Tokyogurl was eventually caught by officials during the SEA semifinal match between Thailand and Vietnam on December 15th, 2025.

The official ruling given was that she had been disqualified for downloading third-party software and thus had broken tournament rules.

However, what actually happened was staff members noticed discrepancies between Tokyogurl’s hand movements and what her character was doing on the broadcast.

After officials paused the match to investigate, it was discovered that she was using Discord to receive a screen share of someone else playing remotely.

She had somebody else nearby logged into her account and shared the fake player’s screen through Discord while pretending to play on her tablet.

This mystery player was revealed to be her boyfriend, a former Arena of Valor pro player, ‘Cheerio.’

Cheerio took to his TikTok to confess and apologise, saying:

“I apologise to those affected by my selfish action, and to all Thai people for bringing shame to the country… This is an important lesson in my life.”

Tokyogurl sets women’s esports hopefuls back

Tokyogurl’s actions have done a lot of damage.

Partially to Thailand, embarrassing her own country while it acted as the host nation of the SEA tournament.

The scandal forced the nation’s women’s AoV team to step down in embarrassment.

Not only did her actions damage her teammates who missed out on a possible gold medal, but she has also hurt the image of women’s esports.

A lot of losers in the gaming community accuse women of being “fake gamers” who only play for male attention.

Now those bad-faith actors have a literal fake gamer to point to.

And trying to compete in esports as a woman is already hard enough with a lack of investment and tournaments closing.

And there have been multiple esports organisations like Guild Esports that tokenistically claim to advocate for women in esports but fail to support them.

Jack Stewart, Senior Editor

In my seven years of esports writing, I've introduced esports coverage to newspapers, interviewed some of the biggest names in the industry, and driven viewers mad with the puns in my YouTube scripts. I'm most proud of the latter.

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