Slothunter says he will personally cover unpaid balances at Yoho after the casino’s June launch

Shamil Ponomarev, known as “Slothunter,” said he will personally compensate players whose balances were not paid out by Yoho, the online casino that launched in June and is now on the verge of shutting down. For anyone watching payments in the Russian-speaking online casino market, the useful detail is not the drama — it is the familiar pattern: a casino launches, starts promoting aggressively, then runs into payout problems when the payment stack stops behaving.

1. According to Ponomarev’s post in one of his Telegram channels, he will cover the unpaid balances from Yoho himself. He also said the casino opened in June and is now effectively closing.
2. The post says Yoho began advertising recently through Ponomarev, who is described as personally communicating with his referral high rollers and other partners. The implication is that the failure hit after promotion had already started, which is the part PSPs and operators tend to care about: exposure first, settlement issues later.
3. The source claims the casino is blaming its payment provider, saying it cannot make payouts and has not been settling for weeks. The text also lists the usual suspects in this kind of failure chain: the provider was drained, the payment entity collapsed, or there were other operational problems. No formal explanation is given in the source.
4. The broader point in the source is that high-risk payment providers are pulling back from the ruble online casino market. It says “reasonable people” do not want to take risks amid unstable conditions, ahead of Duma elections, mobilization, and ongoing arrests of industry peers, while some operators have already moved offices out of Moscow and are trying to reclaim margin from other payment players.
5. The source also describes the market as increasingly degraded: some casinos are surviving on earlier accumulated gross gaming revenue, some have moved into other geographies such as Vulkan, Mostbet, Pinup, Leon, and 1x, and some are left negotiating with payment services that accept deposits from low-value players via SIM cards and Tajik bank cards with 20-30% conversion, if the payment setup does not fail first.

For PSPs, the practical takeaway is straightforward: once a casino is publicly talking about failed withdrawals and the operator is blaming its payment stack, the next step is usually not a tidy technical fix. It is a messy unwind, a reputational hit, and a reminder that payout performance is the real product in this vertical.