CPH Wolves comment on theft case

Last night, HLTV.org reported that Johnathan "Mini" Daniels, a former manager of CPH Wolves, had kept approximately $18,000 of the team's sticker earnings from attending ESL One Cologne to himself after returning $24,500 of the initial figure to the players.

Despite the team's and CPH Wolves' efforts to retrieve the rest of the money, Daniels, who resides in the United Kingdom, is seemingly living off the grid, and all recent efforts to contact him have proved fruitless.

Players still owed approximately $18,000

CPH Wolves founder Jakob Lund Kristensen has now issued a statement in which he underlines that the organisation will continue to fully support the team in this case. Meanwhile, he called on Valve to change the policy regarding sticker payments to prevent similar cases from happening in the future.

"First and foremost we wish to apologize for not issuing a public statement on this matter earlier on in the process. It was deemed, in collaboration with the players, that the chances of succeeding in reclaiming the rest of the lost money was better without a public dispute and the added pressure it brings.

"We have only been working with Johnathan for a very short period of time, he was originally brought in from the players side to represent their interests and seemed a professional and likeable person with good credentials, so we had no reason to deny the players their wish. For the first period of his time with the Copenhagen Wolves he fulfilled his role in any way we could have wished.

"When the time came for the pay-outs of the ESL Cologne Sticker money, we were honestly quite shocked to realize that the money could only be paid out through Steam, especially since Johnathan was the person who had originally uploaded our logo. We attempted to contact VALVE and ask for the possibility of invoicing or other options but without success, though large parts of this communication was handled by Johnathan. Again, at this point we had no reasons to distrust him or his motives.

"After talking things through with the players, we ended up asking them to make a decision if the money being paid through Johnathan was an acceptable solution. We as an organization were only taking a very minor cut, so we felt that this should be the players decision and not ours since it was their money. After agreeing to this solution, we figured the ordeal was over which as everyone know by now, it wasn’t.

"After initially being told by the players that Johnathan had blocked every single member of our organization and team’s phone, Skype, Facebook and Steam my immediate reaction was disbelief, this was a guy all of our players had nothing but praised. I reached out to some personal friends of mine from the United Kingdom and gave them his phone number, hoping they could talk some sense into him before this thing became public. I contacted people he had worked with before in his eSport career and generally was trying to find any way possible to get to talk with him. That same evening, I succeeded.

"It was a clearly distressed person that called me up later that day, claiming that he had never intended to steal the money and still had the full amount on his account. Given the delicate situation we were in, I tried to be as reasonable and forgiving as possible. He told me that he would immediately wire the money to every single player, all I had to do was provide the bank information to him since he had no desire to communicate with the players directly. I provided him with the needed information and he promised me he would send over screenshots and confirmations of the transfers as soon as they were sent.

"This was the last I heard from Johnathan, as he afterwards blocked my phone number and every single one of the people who I had asked to reach out to him. We were happy to hear that the players were starting to receive money, though sadly far from the amount that they should have. We have since tried several ways of getting in contact with Johnathan but without any luck.

"We as an organization will continue to support our players in any way possible in the attempt of reclaiming what is rightfully theirs and we hope that this situation can help caution other teams and hopefully make VALVE consider the current process of only paying out such large amounts of money through a Steam profile.

Jakob Lund Kristensen
Founder, Copenhagen Wolves"