About The Author Leon Twatski I began life in a Russian military family in the old DDR (East Germany) which was fine until the Berlin Wall came down. My father was caught selling Red Army badges and stuff when he wasn't getting paid by Uncle Mikhail, so we were sent to a family sanatorium in an area east of the Urals. After 3 years there when they felt his subversive tendencies had been addressed, we were packed off to a grotty flat in St. Petersburg where my dad got a crap job coating merchant vessels with de-icer at the port. One day I snuck aboard a ship carrying steel tubes and Plutonium to North Korea and managed to sneak ashore there. Somehow they spotted me and were going to execute me for spying until I had a lucky break when some DPRK agents were caught in Europe and I ended up being swapped. I ended up in Zurich on a temporary stateless persons' visa and managed to find work serving drinks in a casino. Those flashing lights and video screens were like nothing I'd ever seen before. Wow. When my visa expired I ended up over the border in Germany, as they'll take anybody in, even an underhourished glow in the dark skinny lad like I was. With my token German plus casino experience I soon found work again at another casino and it was here my gambling really took hold. After 3 years of misery which ended up with self-exclusion from all land casinos and all the online ones too, I managed to get myself together. One day after trying to sneak onto a bendy-bus via the middle door the driver caught me and said "Aus!" very loudly. As I walked dejectedly down the pavement a lawyer came running up behind me and told me that he may well have shouted "Auslander" at me. I said that I hadn't heard that, the lawyer told me I had, and insisted he take action to compensate me for this shocking discrimination. So roll on 14 months and a ruling in the European Court of Human Rights, I had 1.2m euros sitting in the bank for 'injury to feelings'. Now I needed something to spend this on and to my dismay found I couldn't gamble online at all due to excluding- that is until I discovered 1668/JAZ-licensed casinos. I discovered they'd take my money and however much of it I wanted to spend. They were so kind to me, for example when I won offering me 100% extra to play on and not take out my winnings and even helping me to manage my play in nice easy round sums by limiting my withdrawals to 5,000 a month. Their slots often ran a little funny with some dull symbols on the reels and didn't seem to pay that well either, but that's gambling I suppose. Another great thing about these casinos is that they never quibbled once when I was depositing 10k at a time, never asked personal questions or asked for documents - they would always ensure somehow that I never crossed the 2k withdrawal limit which required them to ask me for proof of ID so these guys really helped me lose as smoothly as possible! Hell, they even recommended alternative casinos I could play at if I got bored with theirs! One day, it all came crashing down. After depositing another 10k one night I felt a little tired and simply withdrew my last 1500 left in the account. I had a few e-mails with offers if I reversed it, but I was busy doing other stuff for once. I was over 100k down there by now so I enquired about my payment. Their customer services told me it had to be checked for a few days. Still nothing, then they asked for documents that I knew would be impossible to provide. I told them that this was ridiculous and that they didn't ask when I was 90k down as of the last week. They cut off the chat, and 30 minutes later my account was disabled. That was that. Two weeks later I had read most of the online gaming forums and felt a right twat. What a fucking mug. Just a little bit of homework and I could have saved a fortune spent on these scamming bastards. So now I know how to spot crap terms, fake slots, scam offers, scam licenses, bogus reviews, unlicensed deposits, non-paying casinos - all the ingredients necessary to make a classic SHITHOLE CASINO! P.S. No, I never did get that 1500 pissing euros.