What happened:: Hi,
I want to share my experience with game-protect.com
To start with, I was aware about the negative comments and accusations in this forum but as there was no one who had hard proof that this site/user was a scam (at least as far as I know) I decided to give him a chance.
I do a lot of betting not only at Asian books but also at soft books. Some of them are offshore-licensed in Curacao (BTW I'm the user lonnie55 from that screenshot TwitchySeal posted in #1006). Curacao is a place where from my experience at least 20-25% of the books are scam operations. To date, I was registered at more than 300 books, so occasionally I caught a book that didn't pay out but confiscated my funds. As there is no chance to achieve anything by reaching out to the licensors I asked Game Protect if he can do anything. I told him right from the beginning that I was not willing to spend any money in advance for his services which he was fine with. He offered me a no cure no pay-basis for most of my cases. The condition was that the amount in dispute was high enough (around 5 figures).
It happens back in July 2018 when GP forwarded my first ever case to a lawyer in Curacao. The lawyer from Curacao directly replied to me. I checked if the lawyer exists in reality and found proof that he does. That gave me a little bit of confidence.
Over the time GP and I have sent each other more than 100 emails concerning several issues and scam cases of Curacao based books. He offered me a 65:35 no cure no pay service on almost every case. The fact that he never asked for any money and that I was given the contact details of a real-existing lawyer gave me hope that his service might be legit.
It turned out I was wrong. In April 2019, for the very first time he asked for money. He said he could not apply a no cure no pay model to this specific case since the amount in dispute was too low for that. He asked for 5% of the amount in dispute which was €210. I told him that he knows my position and that I won't spend any money on this. He then said that he can't handle the case without charging a fee. Eventually I thought why not give him a chance after all. He never asked for any money in a time frame of almost a year. Curacao based books scammed me of a 6 digit amount in the past 8 years. €210 is just a drop in the ocean. So I thought f*ck it, let's give him a chance and I sent him the money
This is what he promised:
He also said he will publish an article about that case. This article has yet to appear.
So June 30 passed and he didn't give me any update on my case nor did he refund the money. I've sent him a BTC address and a request to refund the money. He replied: "I handled many claims in the past months (including your other claims) and forgot about this one. However, there are some things in process and it makes sence (sic) to wait longer." I asked him "what kind of process?" and he answered "There are several things going on since the establishment of the foundation. A court case in regard to 1668/JAZ (same license like betmaster.com) was lodged 2 weeks ago. A court case with 365/JAZ claims (including your dobrobet and suprabets claims) will be lodged soon. A 65,000€ claim was successfully settled 2 weeks ago. Casino said duplicate account and canceled account balance and said final decision by management. After involvement of our lawyer they changed to "was an software error! LOL Lawyer is in conversation with different parties."
Of course at this point at the latest his behavior should have raised red flags. Nevertheless I still had the glimpse of a hope he could reach anything in only one of the many cases I had submitted to him, the foundation (of which I'm not sure it really exists as he never handed me out the contact details) or the lawyer.
However, as time passed with no updates from either the foundation or the lawyer and nothing beyond those "some things are in process"-statements from GP I started to consider that all this was possibly a show and the scam accusations were right. My suspicion substantiated when he asked me to borrow him €10. For the second time. He said he had no money in his BTC wallet but needed €10 for a VPN. So this was actually the point where I lost my hope that he wasn't a swindler. I tried to test him and asked him i.a. for a phone number of the foundation but he ignored my request. I immediately asked him to refund my money. But his only reaction was that he closed the tickets of my pending cases which generated an automatic email notification. He's not made any further comment on this. Four days later I've sent him a reminder. Yesterday I've sent him another email: "The fact that you don't answer means that you won't refund the money, right? I just want to remind you of your own words (as mentioned in your email sent on April 30, 2019 17:15 CET): "My activity either will lead to get your money from Bestmaster or you will get the 210EUR back 30 June 2019. I attached screenshot of 310 support tickets and I can assure you that we handle claims totalling $ millions and the chance that I will ruin the reputation of Game Protect for 210EUR is zero point zero." I don't blame you. I just want to learn if the accusations in the BCT forum were right, so that I can close the whole case."
But he didn't reply. Usually he replies with minutes or hours. Due to the fact he is actively posting in this forum right now whilst a) ignoring all of my emails for almost 7 days and b) not refunding my money either, I must assume that he is a scammer.
tl;dr
- I sent GP €210 for covering a processing fee which he promised to refund on June 30 in the event he isn’t able to recover my funds
- he didn’t return the money to date
- he stopped replying to my emails for almost a week
Scammers Profile Link: https://bitcointalksearch.org/user/game-protect-874254Reference Link: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/game-protect-online-gaming-consumer-protection-1535816Amount Scammed: 0.0448 BTC or €210 at that time
Payment Method: Bitcoin
Proof of Payment: https://www.blockchain.com/de/btc/address/1Jomvg8ajgWb15tnxtoepGLkKPCj7ska1mPM/Chat Logs: see above
Additional Notes: I advise you to not deal with this user.