GameDuell

One day after writing this review, I filed a complaint with the BBB, and two months later they got to my case. They contacted Gameduell about it, who contacted me, and said:

"I apologize for the delay in contacting you, unfortunately we were only informed of your complaint with the BBB yesterday and could not locate any mail to ourselves regarding the matter.

When withdrawals are requested, they go through several verification procedures. On this occasion, your withdrawal was subject to a verification of identity, for which reason we contacted you from the e-mail address *******@gameduell.com on 10/01/12 requesting that you complete the form that I have also attached to this e-mail and a copy of a government issued ID, e.g. drivers license.

This is common procedure on our website and aims to ensure that the person registered on a player account truly exists and is also very likely the person using the player account.

On 10/16/12, your player account was deactivated and you were contacted again as we had failed to receive these documents. If you did not receive either of these mails, it is possible that gmail automatically sent them to your Spam folder, though they will have since been deleted automatically by gmail.

Your account is still in our database and the identity verification can still be completed at which point your withdrawal can also be processed.

I apologize again for the confusion and delay.

If you have any further questions, please do not hesitate to contact us."

After I submitted the form they sent me, my account was reactivated.

I may have jumped the gun and allowed myself to believe the worst after reading the other reviews here.

Below is my original review.

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I've been a member of Gameduell for almost a year and a half and never had any trouble withdrawing money, until recently. My latest withdrawal amount was for $142. It's always taken 4 weeks maximum to receive the money I withdraw, and so seeing as the four week mark has just passed, I was feeling like I'd probably be getting the money soon. What happened instead was that today I tried to log in and they kept telling me the login info was wrong. When I tried to fill out the "forgotten your password?" form, they told me they had no record of my email address, so it would be impossible to send me my password. I know I didn't change or forget my password or email address though, the only explanation is that they're doing something wrong.
Someone else here said after they tried to withdraw 300 euros their account was deleted, and now that I've had a similar experience it's seeming more and more like their strategy might just be to make excuses to cancel your membership when they don't want to pay up. Before today that seemed unlikely, because I had withdrawn $70 all at once recently, $35 at once just after that, and before those two withdrawals there were 5 instances spread out over the year where they paid small amounts between $11 and $19 that totaled $66. Apparently their generosity does have a ceiling, though!
I can't even contact customer service to ask what's going on, because only account holders can email them, and they don't have the option of contact by phone. And I'm afraid to create a new account in order to contact them, because then they can use my multiple accounts as an excuse not to help me, claiming I'm violating their terms of use. I'm not sure they'd even answer anyway, though, because they had stopped responding to my emails in the few months before today, which I thought nothing of at the time but now am definitely suspicious about. I don't trust these people anymore.
If there was some legitimate suspicion they had about my account activity, and they weren't just playing a crooked game, you would think they would have contacted me about the problem instead of just suddenly excommunicating me.

What makes this even worse is that I considered myself to have reached a skill rating too high for it to be possible to be matched to any players who weren't too good ever to beat more than once in a great while, so my ability to earn large amounts through Gameduell was at its end. I wish they had at least paid me this last time and THEN deleted my account.
I can't give them only 1 or 2 stars, though, because like I said, they've been great until just recently.
It may be, though, that it was just coincidence that I wasn't exposed to their shady behavior until now, and they would have been screwing me over earlier if I hadn't been somehow flying under their radar. Who knows.