Ossi Ketola Arrested? What Happened in Helsinki
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On Saturday afternoon, one of the most well-known men in the online gambling industry was chased across a Helsinki park by political demonstrators. He was wearing a giant SpongeBob costume. He was live on camera the whole time.
Twenty minutes later, police pulled his car over and walked him to a squad vehicle.
It Started With A Costume
Ossi “Monarch” Ketola is not a quiet man. He built the CS2 skin-gambling site CSGOEmpire at 18 on an 11,000 euro loan. He launched crypto casino Duel.com in 2025. He has lost eight figures on livestreamed poker in a single week and shrugged.
This time he pulled on the Freakbob suit – the bug-eyed SpongeBob knock-off that fronts his casino’s blackjack streams – and walked into a political demonstration in central Helsinki.
Camera rolling. His Kick stream is live.
The City Was Already On A Knife Edge
Helsinki had two rival marches moving through the center that afternoon. Around 900 people. Police had drawn up separate routes and flooded the streets with extra officers for one reason: to stop the two crowds from ever touching.
- Roughly 600 on the antifascist march, out of Rautatientori just before 14:00, heading for Dallapenpuisto park in Vallila.
- Roughly 300 on the Blue-and-Black Movement march, out of Hakaniemi, heading for Kansalaistori.
Then They Started Chasing Him
Everything the world saw came through one X account. @jkercom posted clips lifted from Ketola’s own Kick stream as the afternoon unfolded – and one of those posts is what turned a strange day into a global rumor:
BREAKING: Monarch, Founder of @Duel pulled over and arrested by Finnish police special operations unit in Helsinki
- Joker (@jkercom) September 5, 2026
But the chase came first. That clip runs two minutes and nine seconds: a figure in the Freakbob costume sprinting across grass while several people were chasing him. He got out.
Finnish police logged an incident at that exact spot. Their statement, reported by Helsinki Times, records “an isolated disturbance” at Dallapenpuisto park that afternoon. Nobody hurt. No criminal suspicion. No arrests.
He Was Never Arrested
Two hours later, the same account posted the correction. It reads, in full:
“Update: Monarch was let go moments after and was not accused of any wrongdoing.”
No charge. No case. No accusation. He was back on his Kick stream explaining it himself.
The X Explosion
It got so big that strangers started asking Grok, X’s own AI, to explain who this man in the cartoon suit even was. Grok’s answer – a crypto casino founder from Finland, stopped by special police mid-stream – racked up its own audience.
People who had never heard of poker, Duel, or CSGOEmpire met the brand for the first time through a police stop. Check out our Duel Casino bonus code page to see what this crypto casino offers.
“Staged Asf” – Why Half The Internet Refuses To Believe It
The doubters came out swinging. The top skeptical reply was two words – “Staged asf” -, and it pulled more than 30,000 views on its own. The poster answered with one word: “Real.”
Either way, the brand won. Ketola has been open that his poker matches are marketing for Duel – and this weekend a police stop put the name in front of thousands of people.
So What About Duel?
Within minutes, the replies did what the internet always does. One user cracked that “Duel is now closed for withdrawals.”
The account that broke the story shut it down in four words: “Nothing to do with Duel.”
X suspended Ketola’s personal @Monarch handle, @Duel, and @CSGOEmpire in October 2025, and @Duel remains suspended at the time of writing.
Who Is Ossi Ketola Anyway?
If this is the first you have heard of him, the short version: he is a 27-year-old from Vammala, Finland, who founded CSGOEmpire at 18 on an 11,000 euro loan and now owns the crypto casino Duel.com. He says CSGOEmpire alone earns him around $4 million a month.
He is also the most reckless-looking high-stakes poker player alive. He has dropped around 15 million euros to Dan “Jungleman” Cates in one night , and won the two largest pots in televised poker history – $12.7M and $10.99M – within two weeks of each other. Net across every recorded session: down roughly $21 million.
Since early 2025, I've covered iGaming promotions, online poker platforms, and player stories for SoMuchPoker. I discovered poker at 14 during the poker boom, and I've played cash games, online tournaments, and live events ever since.
