X sues Duel’s founder over a $300,000 bribe attempt and account takeovers

X Corp filed suit against Immortal Snail LLC, the Nevis-registered operator behind crypto casino Duel, in federal court in the Northern District of Texas on September 28, close to X’s own headquarters in Bastrop, accusing founder Ossi Ketola of a years-long campaign to bribe X employees and seize control of accounts. According to Casino.org, the accounts @duel and @monarch were compromised in 2024, with @duel’s registered email swapped to one tied to CSGOEmpire operator Moonrail before X caught the breach and suspended it. An employee was allegedly paid $1,500 that June for internal information about @monarch, and a separate contractor took the same amount to restore access to @duel without authorization.

The bribery attempts escalated after X suspended several Ketola-linked accounts in October 2025. X says one employee was offered $300,000 through messaging apps to reinstate them, a jump from four figures to six that the complaint treats as the clearest sign of how much the handles mattered to Ketola’s operation. That figure alone sets this case apart from the usual low-dollar social engineering attempts platforms deal with constantly; most account-recovery bribes run in the hundreds or low thousands, not six figures offered to a single employee for a handful of usernames.

Rather than keep pushing through insiders once the direct bribes failed to land, Immortal Snail eventually bought the handles outright in 2025 through an intermediary named Haci Isik, picking up @duel, @monarch, and @castle on the open market. X alleges the purchases concealed Immortal Snail’s link to the earlier compromised accounts, meaning the company that had just tried to bribe its way back into those usernames turned around and acquired them through what looked, on paper, like an ordinary handle transaction. Ketola then adopted the newly purchased @monarch handle that April, effectively completing through a legitimate sale what the earlier bribery attempts had failed to accomplish through access.

The complaint also ties Ketola’s circle to hacks beyond X’s own platform, including a 2024 breach of rival skin-gambling site CSGORoll and the account of a former CSGOEmpire product manager known as Grizzly, whose bio was allegedly rewritten to announce it had been “seized” by an account called @JNSAST. X later suspended that account for harassment, doxxing, and threats.

Immortal Snail filed its own claim with the American Arbitration Association in April 2026 seeking to get the suspended accounts back. X’s lawsuit pushes back on the forum itself rather than just the underlying facts, arguing no arbitration agreement exists between the two sides and asking the court to halt that proceeding before it goes any further. That procedural fight matters beyond this one case: if X succeeds in keeping the dispute in federal court instead of private arbitration, the bribery and hacking allegations get argued in public filings rather than behind closed doors, and whatever a judge decides becomes precedent other platforms can point to the next time an operator tries to buy or bribe its way back onto a banned account.

None of the allegations have been tested in court, and Duel has not yet filed a public response. For a platform that’s weathered its own share of domain disputes and competitor friction this year, a federal lawsuit alleging a six-figure bribe attempt, filed in the same state where X itself is based, is a different order of problem than the usual industry sniping.