The most time consuming aspects of processing participant withdrawals are the intensive anti-fraud and anti-money laundering procedures that must be performed for all withdrawals, large or small. In addition, our team must also be sure that PED being withdrawn have been acquired fairly and in accordance with the Entropia Universe Terms of Use and EULA before the withdrawal can be approved.
Withdrawal requests are placed in a queue based on the date of the request, and the queue is processed as quickly as possible while ensuring that all of the procedures described above are completed sufficiently.
Regarding your idea for pre-approval, this unfortunately is not practical since we would still need to perform all of the anti-fraud, anti-money laundering and internal security procedures.
These sentences say nothing we haven't heard before. There are three things with this I don't understand:
1. How do other companies solve this problem? There are no such delays withdrawing Linden Dollars from Second Life. There are seldom delays withdrawing money from any legal betting or gambling outlet (not meaning to throw Entropia in the same pot with them, only looking at the withdrawal process and implying that security and regulation for them must be even stricter). Why is it different only here?
2. Why are users penalized who exclusively use deposit methods which are safe from the viewpoint of MindArk as receiver of the funds? That is, direct bank transfer (domestic or SEPA or SWIFT) or direct debit cards.
3. For those using fraud-ridden credit cards, the critical period within which chargebacks can occur starts at the time of DEPOSIT, not request of withdrawal. Once you can be assured of the funds, what obstacles are there to paying them out?
In essence, what can the user do (or rather, why can't we do anything) to cooperate with your essential security interests in order to speed up the process? How can all those Swedish casinos with their ubiquitous TV ads offer withdrawals within minutes and you can't? When DeepToken was a thing I had hopes that this would address the issue, but it wasn't meant to be.
Can you perhaps offer tiers depending on the effort and risk with legal remedies available to you? Like instant domestic withdrawals (i.e. with a Swedish personnummer on file), within a day or two in EU/EFTA, within a week to other countries with compatible jurisdictions and legal assistance agreements such as the Anglosphere/Commonwealth, and the rest depending on individual risk (cf. secure deposit methods above)?
I'm not questioning necessary security measures (like know-your-customer policy etc), but why it is so bad only here. The extreme and even for the industry unusual asymmetry between deposit and withdrawal times keeps me from considering this RCE as an actual business opportunity beyond mere playing/dabbling. This implies no accusation and I know that many do business with Entropia successfully. I have no reason or evidence to distrust that all withdrawals are honored. But the time to liquidate remains an issue. (In more doubtful moments it can raise the suspicion that withdrawals depend on new deposits coming in. This is not the case, I hope.)
Thanks to OP for asking a question I also consider among the most important and urgent.