Hello,
On November 10th I joined owl.games and made a deposit of 0.2 BTC. I placed several sports bets in the 2 months after that and built up my balance to 0.3BTC with this.
Then I requested a withdrawal on 4th of January for the full amount of my account (0.30087266 BTC) and after a couple days of waiting and it sill not being processed I decided to go and check what was wrong. I could not get into my account anymore as there was a popup message saying I needed to submit KYC. Fine, so I did. Then a couple days later I was told I also needed to do a Skype video verification, which I also did. I had to show my passport, my driving license and answer some questions. All was succesful and on Skype they told me my account was re-opened. So I could log in again but then I saw my balance looked strange. My pending payout was cancelled and my balance was showing a very strange amount of 0.20117097 BTC. So I wondered what was going on since there was roughly 0.1 BTC missing.
I spent the next 3 weeks tying to get answers and was met with a HORRIBLE customer service. I sent about 20 chat messages (90% of them zero response, some of them not even read after 5 days of waiting), 1 email (no response) and contacted them on Twitter both via DM and a normal tweet (no response).
The very few times they did reply it was "hello how can I help you" when I just explained the whole story 1 line above this text.....so I felt not being taken seriously at all.
Now, yesterday, finally a real answer came.....and it was really short....."we confiscated your winnings of 0.1 BTC since you are from a restricted country and you should withdraw your initial balance now". After this I said I am NOT from a restricted country and explained to them the situation, both in their livechat and in the Skype chat to their verification team. But again, zero response on both even though I can see they read it. So I wanted to post about this in their regular topic in the gambling section on this forum, but it turns out they temporarily closed their thread on January 5th to "focus on better customer service and we are open 24/7 for questions" :
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5378280.1200Quite a joke, if you see how they are treating me.....except I cannot laugh about it.
So after having tried everything for 3 weeks now to solve this between me and Owl I now see no other option than to hopefully attract their attention via this thread.
As things stand now I am being scammed, but if they can credit back the missing amount and let me withdraw the original amount of 0.3 BTC then I consider it solved. I still have a small hope this is not them acting malice and that it's just incompetence but they have ignored me structurally so it looks very bad.
These are the facts:
- I never used VPN, placed all my bets from regular German IP-address
- I was born in Netherlands so I have a Netherlands passport (which is something I cannot change) but I have been living in Germany for 17 years already and everything I have is German: bank account, electricity bill, tax papers, car papers, driving license etc.
- On the Skype verification call I clearly said I live in Germany and they did not dispute this or ask me why I have a Netherlands passport.
- On the Skype verification call I showed them both my Netherlands passport and my German driving license
- If they looked closer at my Netherlands passport they could also have spotted that it was given out by the Dutch consolate in Dusseldorf, Germany, so this alone should also show that I live in Germany, but okay that is a small detail so I don't blame them for missing this.
- At no point during this verification call they asked for a utility bill to prove that I really live in Germany so I supposed they fully accepted my remark that I lived in Germany. But if they had asked I would have gladly provided them this. And also now I can still provide them this if they need it.
- At no other casino/sportsbook I ever had a problem with my Netherlands passport combined with a German driving license. They always simply accept that where you live is what counts, not where you were born.
So the worst of this all is that they simply decided on their own that I was from a restricted country, probably because it gave them a reason to confiscate 0.1 BTC.
And they did not even inform me of this. On the skype verification call all they said was that the verification was succesful and my account was open again. And in the livechat I had to ask about 20 times combined in about 3 weeks of time before I finally got one line out of them "we confiscated your winnings of 0.1 BTC since you are from a restricted county and you should withdraw your initial balance now" after which they became silent again after my follow-up questions.
So either this is a scam plus horrible customer service, or at best this is complete incompetence and a very bad experience but hopefully they finally see the light now and will credit me back the fair sportsbook winnings of 0.1BTC. In that case I hope they can learn from this and improve their customer service dramatically.
I have to say I am shocked by this behaviour since the reason I joined Owl in the first place was because they seems to have little or no complaints agianst them and I thought they have a fairly decent reputation.
For Owl's reference: my username is WesjeK
Screenshots below:
Deposit on Nov 10th:
Payout on Jan4th which got rejected: