The simple fact is that yesterday was the first time I heard about that 2K, when towersoft sent me the following e-mail:
Thanks for all your help! £2500 appeared in my Neteller account yesterday. I should get another £2500 next month. I will add however that the £2000 I had in pending withdrawal (making the £7k) has got lost it would appear. I will talk to Tropica about re-opening my account so I can get the relevant info from it to allow me to show the validity of my initial complaint. Thanks again for all your help, I will let you know how things continue
Until then, it was my understanding from both towersoft and Tropica that we were discussing £5000.
Towersoft's first request for help read as follows:
I deposited around £3200 from account opening and had withdrawn at that point about £1K. They where telling me I was on track to be a VIP and giving me some of my losses back now and again. I deposited a few more times and managed to rack up a £10k balance. The casino has a £1k a week payout limit like most Rivals so I could only put in £1K at a time so the casino paid me £2k over the next couple of weeks. Then as soon as it started to be apparent that they where going to have to pay me some of their own money This happened.
This really left unclear just how much towersoft felt he was owed. He said he had a £10k balance, but that they gave him "some of my losses back now and again" and had withdrawn £1K, and later another £2k. Between what they had paid him earlier, the £1K payment and the £2k payment I was not at all certain how much he was owed when I wrote to Tropica.
Tropica then sent an e-mail to Towersoft (and sent me a copy) which read:
I see £3,000 has been paid to you and your account has a balance of £5000. If we are entitled to a payment, it will be paid in 2 instalments of £2500 (1 per month). I will notify you of our decision once I have the data. Please be patient while we complete the process.
That was a week before Tropica approved the payments. During that time, Towersoft did not tell me that Tropica's accounting was wrong and hence I had no reason to even suspect that it might be.
There are some very serious issues here.
Firstly, it seems you have been sent the quote:-
We have confirmation from Rival that you are not a genuine player. You simply play big till you win and then you cash out and move on. While we understand winning is what all players go for, it is cause for concern when we know we will not get a chance to win some of our winnings back
Now, here Dieter is claiming this could never have come from them, nor Rival, and that they cannot find any trace of this email having been sent to this player. This quote is what got them added to the not recommended pit here under "CS torches up the crack pipe". If this is disputed, this should have been made clear by Dieter to Gambling Grumbles.
next, we have this:-
We have not been able to get the information we require from the previous owners or Rival
I can't stress how SERIOUS this is. It means that when there is a change of ownership at any Rival casino, no audit trail is kept of players' money during the process, so all we have is the players' screenshot and confirmation emails to go on. It also means that Rival have no means to refute the player's claim as to the amounts involved.
Given that data has disappeared, one has to wonder what other data the previous owners may have simply "walked off with", such as players' personal information, itself a valuable commodity. Since they no longer operate Tropica, NONE of the data should have gone with them, and so it is odd that the previous owners are being asked to trace the data in the first place.
Since we know that Rival does pretty much everything for the casinos, all the data should be there, and available for scrutiny should the need arise.
It seems that when white labels change hands, Rival tends to view data under the previous ownership as no longer worth keeping, so they may not necessarily have it in the event of a dispute, even one a mere couple of months after the casino changes hands. It's a setup that seems to indicate that the intent is to allow players' balances fall victim to ownership changes, and they have been caught out in this case because there is a pressing need for this data in resolving this case, and it has gone.
Since the data has gone, the rep cannot back up some of the claims he has made here. For a start, he cannot back up the claim that the offending emails did not come from Rival CS or the Tropica team prior to the change in ownership.
Lastly, it seems many bogus excuses were trotted out in order to deny payment before we started getting this "not a real player" story.
The first was an amateur attempt to make the OP look like a fraudster, and it erred in trying to portray IP geolocation as 100% accurate when matching a given IP address to a specific physical location. All they have left is this vague "not a real player" leading to them not having a fair chance of winning back their money.
Whilst they may pay the OP 5K of the disputed 7K, it does not make their shoddy record keeping of players' balances any better.
Since the OP has also made deposits of more than 3K, he cannot be classed as a "free chip hunter" either; he IS risking his own money, but chooses to play without any bonus when depositing, and using only the free bonuses the casino gives him, which is their choice.
If they are trying to suggest that never claiming deposit bonuses is "abuse", it won't fly.
In other casinos, it is viewed that "depositing only when a bonus can be taken" is "abusive", and players are often told that they should deposit their own money without an expectation of a bonus as part of "being loyal".
Given the bonus terms found in many Rivals, it is a very good idea to steer well clear of deposit bonuses with their restrictive terms and low max cashouts. In this case, how about the PLAYER having a fair chance of winning back their money, a situation that arises with deposit bonuses with restrictive max cashout terms that would prevent a losing player from having a "fair chance" of winning back what they had spent at the casino over the life of their account.
I am not even 100% certain I believe this "new ownership" story, as it seems we have some of the same people involved at Tropica under the new owners that we had under the old. Also, until this case came up, there was no mention of this ownership change, and surely a lack of data transfer about player balances would have created quite a few problems, and we would have a number of players in dispute about money and withdrawals that straddled this change.