X Sues the Company Behind Duel Casino, Alleging Bribes Paid to Its Staff

X Corp. has asked the US District Court for the Northern District of Texas to shut down an arbitration brought by Immortal Snail LLC, the Nevis company that runs the crypto casino Duel. Its complaint, filed on September 28, alleges that Duel’s founder and the company bribed X staff to get hold of handles and suspended accounts, and that one employee was offered $300,000.

The complaint is case 4:26-cv-01254 in the Fort Worth Division, and Immortal Snail is the only defendant. Ossi Ketola, the founder X says “calls himself ‘monarch’ on the internet,” is not a party. Nothing in the filing has been tested in court.

A Stay of Arbitration, Not a Bribery Claim

Immortal Snail went first. On April 8 it filed a claim with the American Arbitration Association over X’s suspension of the @duel, @monarch and @castle accounts, which X says it shut down around October 21, 2025. The claim asks for an order making X “fully restore” all three.

X’s suit pleads three counts. They are a declaratory judgment, a permanent stay of the arbitration and breach of contract. X also wants a temporary restraining order and a preliminary injunction to freeze the arbitration in the meantime, plus damages of more than $75,000 including legal fees. The bribery allegations aren’t pleaded as claims of their own. X uses them to argue it had cause to suspend the accounts.

The argument is about contracts. X says its terms of service, its purchaser terms and its handle transfer agreement all send disputes to federal or state courts in Texas, and that none of them contains an arbitration clause. The arbitrator decided on August 25, at a hearing X did not attend, that he could rule on his own jurisdiction.

What X Says Happened to @duel

According to the complaint, Ketola and Immortal Snail took over another user’s @duel account on March 25, 2024, and X suspended it two days later as compromised and stolen. X alleges that a middleman then bribed an X employee for internal information about the account, and that a contractor was later bribed to reinstate it. Both were terminated, the filing says.

X tells a similar story about @monarch. The complaint alleges a contractor was bribed to move the handle to an account Ketola and Immortal Snail controlled, and that an employee later admitted photographing internal information for an outside party who had offered him $1,500.

Handles Bought Through a Go-Between

X says the handles were later bought from the company itself through a go-between. A third party approached X in 2025 saying he wanted @duel for an esports site, and purchases of @duel, @monarch and @castle followed in March, April and June of that year. Immortal Snail made the payments, and X alleges it “fraudulently omitted” its link to the suspended accounts.

The $300,000 offer allegedly came after the October 2025 suspensions. The complaint says Ketola and Immortal Snail sent letters impersonating a US law firm to demand reinstatement, and tried to bribe X employees, “including offering one X employee $300,000 through various messaging platforms.” It doesn’t name the employee.

Duel Says It Paid $480,000, Then Got Banned

Immortal Snail’s version is in its own arbitration demand, which X attached as an exhibit. It says it paid X $480,000 for the three handles in 2025, made up of $300,000 for @Duel, $80,000 for @Monarch and $100,000 for @Castle, and that the accounts were suspended months later “without meaningful notice or explanation.”

The demand calls X’s ban-evasion explanation “a pretext” and says the company believes the suspension may have been prompted by business competitors. It says X has not refunded the money. X’s complaint acknowledges the argument and answers that Ketola and Immortal Snail “are the ones who have systematically engaged in commercial bribery.”

The same document describes Duel as a cryptocurrency-based online casino and sportsbook launched around June and July 2025, and says “Duel’s main method of marketing is through its presence on the X platform.” Losing the accounts, it says, halted Duel’s growth.

An Offshore Casino in a Fort Worth Court

X’s filing describes Duel as an offshore site that is not authorized to do business in the US, and quotes the casino’s own terms as saying it is “not allowed to accept players from” the country. Ketola’s other site, CSGOEmpire, is run by a Curaçao company that Spain fined €5 million for operating without a license, the complaint says.

The complaint cites a December 2025 New York Times investigation into crypto casinos and an August 2025 letter from the National Association of Attorneys General to the Department of Justice about illegal offshore gambling.

The federal docket shows the case was reassigned on September 30 and is now with Judge Terry R. Means. The arbitrator’s ruling on jurisdiction, and on Immortal Snail’s request to get its accounts back, is due by October 9, according to the complaint.