Quick withdrawal casino Australia 2026: how fast offshore casinos really pay, and what the ACMA has done about them

“Quick withdrawal” is the phrase that sells offshore casinos to Australians, and it is also the phrase that the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) has spent the last decade quietly sanding the shine off. The promise is straightforward: deposit, play, and have your winnings back in your account inside minutes rather than days. The reality is more layered. Australian bank rails genuinely do move money in under sixty seconds, but the casino on the other end of that transfer sits outside Australian law, and the ACMA has warned, fined, or blocked enough of them for the marketing copy to read very differently once you have seen the registry.

This page walks through what offshore operators claim, what the ACMA has actually done, how the local payment rails underneath them really work, and what realistic withdrawal times look like once a punter separates the rails from the casino. The angle is choice — what paths exist for an Australian who wants a fast payout, who each path suits, and where each one breaks down.

Data current as of 17 October 2026. Operator status cross-checked against the ACMA’s published formal warnings and blocking notices.

What “quick withdrawal” actually means in an Australian context

A quick withdrawal, in the marketing language of offshore casinos, means a payout processed faster than the industry baseline that once ran to several business days. In practice the benchmark offshore brands compete on sits somewhere between ten minutes and twenty-four hours, with the most aggressive claims naming ten to fifteen minutes from the moment the cashout button is pressed. That figure is the headline number, and it is the one players remember.

The technical reality behind it is split into two halves. The first half is the casino’s own internal process: the moment a withdrawal request is made, an operator’s payments team checks it against anti-money-laundering (AML) and know-your-customer (KYC) rules, and approves or flags it. The second half is the payment rail the operator sends the money down: a bank wire, a card refund, an e-wallet push, or — increasingly — an instant payment on Australia’s New Payments Platform (NPP) addressed to a PayID. The casino’s own half can take anywhere from a few minutes to several days, and the rail’s half is the bit that can genuinely be instant if everything aligns.

For an Australian player the rails underneath are the same rails their salary lands on. PayID, Osko, and the broader New Payments Platform can settle a transfer in under a minute between participating banks, twenty-four hours a day including weekends. That is a structural feature of Australian payments, not a gift from any casino. The question is which offshore operators actually use those rails, which still drag payouts through legacy bank wires, and which have a record of approving withdrawals at all.

A useful mental model is to separate three different clocks that all get called “the withdrawal time”. The first is the marketing clock — what the casino’s homepage claims, usually a single best-case number. The second is the queue clock — how long the operator’s payments team takes to approve the cashout, which can stretch into days during weekends, public holidays, or when KYC documents are still outstanding. The third is the rail clock — how long the funds take to arrive once the operator has released them. On an NPP transfer addressed to a PayID, that third clock can genuinely be under a minute. On an international bank wire, it can be two to five business days even after the operator has pressed send.

Honest operators name all three. The less honest ones mention only the third, and let the reader assume the rest are equally fast.

How the Australian payment rails underneath the marketing work

Australia runs a fast payment stack that is unusual by international standards, and offshore casinos that want to claim instant payouts to Australian accounts have a choice about whether to plug into it or not.

Osko and the New Payments Platform

Osko is the consumer-facing brand of the NPP’s real-time settlement layer. A transfer using Osko between participating banks arrives in under a minute, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. It works whether the transfer is addressed to a BSB and account number or to a PayID — the recipient’s registered alias. The system went live to the public on 13 February 2018, is operated by Australian Payments Plus (AP+, the merged entity that also runs BPAY and eftpos), and is built on infrastructure whose 13 shareholders include the Reserve Bank of Australia and the major banks. Service-level commitments between participants cap monthly outages at no more than two minutes.

For an Australian punter, the rail is the easy half of the equation. Where the casino does not natively support Osko, the transfer still works — it just runs as an ordinary direct entry, which is the legacy batch system that processes on business days and takes one to two business days to clear.

PayID as a recipient alias

A PayID is a registered identifier — typically a mobile number or email address — that resolves to a bank account at the recipient’s bank. Over 100 Australian financial institutions support PayID-based instant transfers, and more than 25 million PayIDs had been registered on the platform by April 2025. From the sender’s perspective the experience is to type a PayID into their banking app, see the name of the recipient appear for confirmation, and send.

That confirmation step is one of the more underappreciated pieces of consumer protection in Australian payments. Paying to a PayID, the sender sees the account holder’s name before they authorise the transfer. AP+ warns explicitly that being asked to send money to a PayID on an illegal gambling site almost certainly indicates a scam. For Australians dealing with offshore casinos the implication is uncomfortable: a casino that lets you deposit by PayID is, by the same token, a casino that has named the recipient before your money leaves — and that name belongs to a corporate entity in some other jurisdiction, not to an Australian-licensed operator.

BPAY as an alternative deposit route

BPAY has operated in Australia since 18 November 1997 and is available in the online banking of more than 140 banks and financial institutions, with over 95,000 businesses accepting payment through it. It is a bill-payment service, not a push-payment service: the payer enters a Biller Code and a Customer Reference Number printed on the bill (or, in this case, on the casino’s deposit page), and the funds settle overnight.

BPAY has two practical drawbacks for an Australian punter. The first is that withdrawals do not run through BPAY — it is a one-way bill-payment rail. The second is that paying a BPAY bill to a casino is paying a bill at all, which means the transaction will appear on a bank statement labelled with the biller’s name, and the bank’s gambling-block feature (where the customer has switched one on) will often pick it up regardless of the merchant category code (MCC) the casino tried to assign.

Cards, digital wallets, and the credit-card ban

Australia’s licensed online wagering services cannot accept credit cards or credit-related products as payment, a restriction that has applied since the Interactive Gambling Act 2001 was amended in 2023 and that also constrains gambling use of linked digital wallets such as Apple Pay. That ban sits on top of the MCC-based gambling blocks the banks themselves offer.

Westpac’s gambling block works at card level. It refuses authorisation of transactions registered under the merchant category code “Betting/Casino Gambling” on eligible personal credit and debit cards, which is the same MCC most offshore casinos will try to apply at the point of sale. ANZ’s equivalent, set in the ANZ app, blocks gambling transactions made through a digital wallet such as Apple Pay on an eligible card, not just the physical card. Commonwealth Bank lets customers apply a gambling lock to eligible cards through the CommBank app, with the same caveat the other two banks give: the lock is a best-effort block, and the bank cannot guarantee every gambling-related purchase will be stopped. Apple Pay itself does not charge consumers fees for in-store, online, or in-app purchases, and Apple does not set transaction limits or PIN requirements — those come from the card issuer or the merchant.

The aggregate effect is that an Australian punter trying to deposit at an offshore casino is likely to hit at least one of these layers: a bank-level gambling block on the card, a refusal on a credit card under the IGA, or a confirmation step on a PayID that surfaces a name nobody recognises. None of these are foolproof, but they are the reason offshore casinos spend so much energy on alternative routes — e-wallets, prepaid vouchers, and, increasingly, cryptocurrency.

Digital wallets and crypto

By the end of 2025, Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Samsung Pay transactions collectively accounted for around 45% of all card payments in Australia by number. As a deposit route into an offshore casino they are an obvious target, and they sit in a grey zone under the IGA: the wallet itself is a payment token backed by a debit or credit card, and the bank’s gambling block will generally reach the underlying card regardless of which wallet fronts it.

Cryptocurrency is the route most offshore casinos actively steer players toward. It is also the route the ACMA is most willing to act on, both because the transactions are pseudonymous and because the IGA’s prohibition on credit-related products has been read by some licensed operators as covering digital currency as well. A casino asking an Australian for a crypto deposit is, in practice, a casino that has decided the local rails are not working out for it.

What the ACMA has done — and what is still standing

The ACMA is the regulator. Under the Interactive Gambling Act 2001 (IGA), strengthened by the Interactive Gambling Amendment Act 2017, it is an offence to provide online casino games, online pokies, or in-play betting to a person in Australia, and no state or territory licenses them. The product simply does not exist in the licensed Australian market. What is licensable is wagering on races and sport placed before the event, lotteries and keno — in practice licensed by the Northern Territory, where the Northern Territory Racing and Wagering Commission (NTRWC) regulates 52 of Australia’s online bookmakers (Sportsbet, Bet365, Ladbrokes among them) for tax reasons. The NTRWC has no full-time staff and meets once a month in Darwin.

That is the legal floor. What the ACMA has built on top of it over the last nine years is an enforcement record that anyone comparing offshore “quick withdrawal” casinos needs to read before signing up.

By June 2026, the ACMA had asked Australian internet service providers to block 1,751 illegal gambling and affiliate marketing websites since the first blocking request in November 2019, and more than 230 unlicensed gambling services had left the Australian market since enforcement was strengthened in 2017. The most recent blocking round reported on 26 June 2026 added another twelve sites: 7Signs, ChromaBet, Donbet, Duospin, Freshbet, Slots Gem, Jacks Club, Lucky Start, Pointsbetz.com, Spinrise, Vinyl Casino and Wildsino.

The blocking list is only the most visible lever. The ACMA also issues formal warnings — published letters to named operators that put them on notice that their service is being provided in breach of the IGA. Each of the eleven operators reviewed below carries at least one of those warnings, and several carry more than one across different corporate vehicles.

What the formal warnings do, and what they do not

A formal warning is not a fine and it is not a prosecution. It is a published notice, addressed to a named corporate entity, recording the ACMA’s finding that the named website has offered prohibited interactive gambling services to Australians. Once published, it sits in the ACMA’s public register indefinitely, and it becomes the predicate for further action — including a civil penalty proceeding in the Federal Court or a request to ISPs to block the site — if the operator does not bring its conduct into line.

What a formal warning does not do is compensate a player whose withdrawal is refused. An offshore casino’s terms and conditions sit under whatever jurisdiction the operator is incorporated in, and an Australian punter has no complaints body to take a complaint to. The ACMA’s warnings are a public record; they are not a guarantee of any individual payout. The protection they offer is prospective — a brand with multiple warnings is a brand the regulator has flagged more than once, which is information an Australian player can use before depositing, not after a withdrawal stalls.

The blocking rate, in rough numbers

The arithmetic the page earns is the rate at which the ACMA has run through the offshore industry since 2017. From the first blocking request in November 2019 through the round reported on 26 June 2026, the ACMA has moved from blocking individual sites one or two at a time to clearing out batches of more than ten in a single round, and the cumulative count has reached 1,751. Spread across roughly 79 months, that is an average blocking rate of around 22 sites per month across the whole enforcement period — though the rate has accelerated sharply in the last two years as the ACMA has formalised batch processes and the industry has continued to launch new mirror sites under fresh brand names.

Read as a band rather than a single number, the blocking rate is the figure that frames every individual operator on this page. The ACMA is not on a slow bureaucratic path here. It is in a steady cadence of enforcement against an industry that keeps repopulating, and an offshore casino standing today is, by the regulator’s own pattern, on a clock measured in months rather than years.

The eleven operators the ACMA has warned — and what their quick-withdrawal pitch rests on

The operators below are not ranked. They are not recommendations. Each one is on this list because the ACMA itself issued a formal warning over it for offering prohibited interactive gambling services to Australians, and because each one markets itself, in some form, on the speed of its withdrawals. The point of grouping them is not to crown a winner. It is to show, side by side, how thin the marketing claim sits once the warning is read.

What the table below records is the regulatory record the ACMA itself published. The “Subject support” column notes whether research found any third-party listings naming the brand in connection with payment infrastructure, and is not the operator’s own claim.

The operator-by-operator writeups below say, in plain language, what each record looks like and where the quick-withdrawal pitch sits against it. No payout times are quoted, because the ACMA’s published record is the only thing that can be sourced, and the ACMA does not record payout times. Where a brand is named in third-party listings in connection with a payment method, that is noted as the source of the link rather than as an endorsement of the operator.

RocketPlay — same brand, two warnings across four years

RocketPlay is the brand on this list with the longest regulatory tail. The ACMA issued a formal warning to Dama N.V. covering it in May 2022 as one of six Dama brands (alongside Bambet, Dazard, Level Up, Wild Tornado and Cobra Casinos), and then issued a second formal warning, this time to Pulsup Ltd, over Rocketplay.com.au in March 2026. The same brand name, the same offer to Australians, two different corporate vehicles, four years apart.

The fact that a brand has been warned, dropped, picked up by another operator, and warned again is the pattern the ACMA’s enforcement record describes when an offshore operator decides an Australian customer base is worth the regulatory friction. Third-party listings reference the brand on Gamblinginsider.com; that is the limit of what research sources carry.

For an Australian punter the verdict is uncomfortable: the brand has been told twice that its offering to Australians is unlawful, and the most recent warning is dated March 2026. There is no Australian licence for online casino games to fall back on, no BetStop coverage if a punter wants to self-exclude, and no Australian complaints body if a withdrawal stalls.

Level Up Casino — Dama N.V.’s first wave

Level Up Casino was one of the six Dama N.V. brands formally warned in May 2022. The warning is dated, the operator is named, and the same Dama N.V. corporate entity went on to receive further warnings over Woo Casino in March 2025 and Spirit Casino in May 2025, suggesting a single operator continued to push the same product through multiple brand names across three years.

Level Up is the brand on this list with the oldest formal warning still standing. It is also the one with the thinnest present-day footprint: no Australian-licensed payment infrastructure supports an offer the ACMA has been on the record about for four years. The quick-withdrawal pitch, if the brand is still running one, sits on a corporate record that has been on the ACMA’s register since before the current wave of enforcement accelerated.

Woo Casino and Spirit Casino — Dama N.V.’s second wave

Woo Casino and Spirit Casino share an operator (Dama N.V.) and a parent record (the May 2022 six-brand warning), but they received their own formal warnings in March 2025 and May 2025 respectively. The pattern is the same: the ACMA named a corporate entity, the operator rotated the brand or relaunched, and the regulator followed up.

For Woo, the absence of any third-party payment-infrastructure listing is itself a data point. Spirit is in the same position. A brand that has been warned, that has no listings referencing local Australian payment rails, and that offers casino games Australians cannot legally play is a brand offering, at minimum, a withdrawal experience with no documented local infrastructure behind it.

National Casino and Bizzo Casino — Consolutetish S.R.L. in 2025, with Bizzo’s earlier TechSolutions record

National Casino and Bizzo Casino were both the subject of formal warnings issued to Consolutetish S.R.L. in July 2025. Bizzo’s regulatory history is longer than its Consolutetish record. The ACMA had already issued a formal warning to TechSolutions (CY) Group Limited and TechSolutions Group N.V. over Bizzo Casino in 2022, so the brand has now been warned twice across two different corporate vehicles.

National Casino is the brand on this list with the most diverse third-party coverage: listings reference acma.gov.au (the regulator itself), austrac.gov.au (the financial-crimes regulator), and betstop.gov.au (the National Self-Exclusion Register). The BetStop listing in particular is a signal that self-exclusion coverage for Australian players — which only binds Australian-licensed operators — is something National Casino has had to publish about, even though it is not licensed in Australia and is therefore not formally bound by the register.

Ignition Casino — Bamboo Media, July 2025

Ignition Casino was the subject of a formal warning to Bamboo Media in July 2025. The brand name has had a long life under different operators in different jurisdictions, and its Australian record is the briefest on this list: one warning, one corporate entity, no third-party listings referencing local payment infrastructure. The quick-withdrawal claim is unsubstantiated by anything in the research record.

Instant Casino — EOD Code SRL, February 2025

Instant Casino carries one of the more recent ACMA warnings before the 2026 cluster. The formal warning was issued to EOD Code SRL in February 2025. Third-party listings reference the brand on Ecopayz.com and Payid.com.au — which, taken together, suggest that the operator has, at some point, claimed connections to both an e-wallet and to PayID as a deposit route.

The PayID link is the more interesting of the two. AP+ explicitly warns that being asked to transfer money to a PayID on an illegal gambling site almost certainly means a scam site. An operator that surfaces on a PayID listing without being an Australian-licensed entity is, on AP+’s own reading, the operator the PayID confirmation step is meant to catch.

Jackbit — Ryker B.V., April 2026

Jackbit is one of the two most recently warned brands on this list, with a formal warning issued to Ryker B.V. in April 2026 (alongside a sister brand, CasinOK). The brand has no third-party listings referencing Australian payment infrastructure in the research record. As with any operator this recent on the ACMA’s register, the warning itself is the freshest available signal that the operator is offering prohibited services to Australians.

Casino Intense — Sterplay Holding Ltd, April 2025

Casino Intense carries a formal warning issued to Sterplay Holding Ltd in April 2025. Third-party listings reference the brand on austrac.gov.au, betstop.gov.au, and Gamblinginsider.com. The AUSTRAC reference in particular is worth pausing on: AUSTRAC’s threshold-transaction-report rule applies only to physical cash transactions of A$10,000 or more, not to electronic bank transfers regardless of amount, but AUSTRAC also tracks reporting entities under the Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorism Financing Act, and any casino branding that surfaces on AUSTRAC’s record is, by definition, an entity whose transactions the financial-crimes regulator has reason to monitor.

Sky Crown — Hollycorn N.V., Hollycorn’s other casino

Sky Crown is one of two Hollycorn N.V. casino brands formally warned by the ACMA (the other is Blue Leo), with the warning published in September 2022. The brand has no third-party listings referencing Australian payment infrastructure in the research record. Hollycorn N.V. as a corporate entity has a wider footprint across offshore casino markets than its Australian appearance suggests, which is itself the pattern the ACMA’s record describes.

How long an Australian withdrawal actually takes, rail by rail

Once the offshore casino has approved a withdrawal, the clock that matters is the rail’s clock, because that is the part the Australian punter can verify.

A withdrawal sent to an Australian bank account via Osko, addressed to a PayID, generally arrives in under a minute, twenty-four hours a day including weekends. That is the rail’s own settlement time. The bank does not pause for weekends or public holidays, because the NPP infrastructure does not pause. This is the part of the “quick withdrawal” pitch that is genuinely true and genuinely fast, and it is the part the offshore operator did not build.

A withdrawal sent via standard direct entry (the legacy batch system) takes one to two business days to clear once released by the operator, and longer over a long weekend. Most Australian banks treat Friday evening as the cutoff for that day’s batch.

An international bank wire from an offshore operator can take two to five business days even after the operator has pressed send, because the wire passes through one or more correspondent banks on the way from the operator’s jurisdiction to an Australian account. The operator’s “processing time” rarely includes the correspondent-bank leg.

A refund to a Visa or Mastercard debit card takes one to three business days in most cases, again after the operator has approved the cashout. American Express refunds are processed within the Amex network rather than the four-party Visa/Mastercard scheme, and the Reserve Bank of Australia’s July 2025 review proposes removing surcharges only on eftpos, Mastercard and Visa transactions — explicitly leaving American Express outside the scope of the proposed surcharge ban. The RBA’s scope decision is about surcharging, not settlement time, but it is a reminder that Amex is a different network with its own economics.

A withdrawal to an e-wallet (Neteller, Skrill, ecoPayz and similar) typically arrives in the e-wallet account within twenty-four hours of the operator’s release, and the e-wallet-to-bank transfer then takes another one to three business days. That is the part of the “quick withdrawal” pitch that involves two queues: one at the operator, one at the e-wallet.

A withdrawal in cryptocurrency sits on a blockchain, and the time-to-confirmation varies by chain. Bitcoin’s typical confirmation time is ten to sixty minutes depending on fee paid, Ethereum’s is similar in steady state but volatile under load, and the operator typically requires a fixed number of confirmations before crediting the wallet. Once credited, the Australian punter is on their own to convert the cryptocurrency to Australian dollars through an exchange, which adds another layer of fees, timing, and tax reporting.

The honest summary is that the fastest plausible Australian withdrawal from an offshore casino is one the operator sends down the Osko rail addressed to a PayID, with the operator’s own approval queue collapsing to its minimum. The plausible upper bound is several business days plus an operator queue that has stretched. The marketing claim is almost always the lower bound; the realistic experience is the upper.

What the marketing word “instant” actually buys you

“Quick” and “instant” are not the same word, but offshore operators use them as if they were. The ACMA does not test either claim, and the IGA does not set a minimum payout time. What an Australian punter is actually buying with the marketing word is the operator’s commitment to release the funds within the time stated in the terms and conditions — not the rail time, not the bank time, not the time the funds take to clear into the punter’s account.

Two practical consequences follow.

The first is that the operator’s own processing time is the gate, and the gate has very few external constraints. Anti-money-laundering checks, source-of-funds checks, and additional KYC documentation requests all add time the marketing page never mentions. An operator that flags a withdrawal for additional KYC can stretch its processing time from minutes to days without ever saying it has failed to deliver “instant” payouts.

The second is that an offshore operator has no external body policing the queue. An Australian-licensed bookmaker is bound by Australian Consumer Law, by AUSTRAC’s reporting obligations, and by the operator’s licence conditions with the NTRWC. An offshore casino is bound by whatever the operator’s own terms say and by the law of whatever jurisdiction the operator is incorporated in. The marketing word is a promise. The promise is enforceable in the operator’s jurisdiction, not in Australia. The enforcement cost of chasing it is, in practice, a multiple of the disputed amount.

Where the responsible-gaming scaffolding actually is

The responsible-gaming scaffolding in Australia is built for Australian-licensed operators, and an offshore casino is not on it.

BetStop, the National Self-Exclusion Register, has been live since August 2023, but it binds only Australian-licensed online and phone wagering services. An offshore casino is not connected to BetStop, and a punter who has self-excluded through BetStop can still deposit at and play on an offshore site. The third-party listings referencing betstop.gov.au in connection with some of the operators on this page reflect the brands appearing in coverage of the register, not their participation in it.

The National Gambling Helpline — 1800 858 858 — is free, runs twenty-four hours a day, and offers chat through Gambling Help Online. It is the right first call for anyone whose gambling has stopped being fun, regardless of whether they have been playing at an Australian-licensed operator or an offshore one.

The major Australian banks’ gambling-block features — Westpac’s card-level MCC block, ANZ’s app-based gambling lock with a 48-hour cool-off before removal, and Commonwealth Bank’s CommBank-app gambling lock — all sit in front of an offshore casino’s deposit page as well as a licensed one. ANZ’s gambling block also blocks gambling transactions made through a digital wallet such as Apple Pay on an eligible card, and the bank warns that the block is best-effort rather than absolute. None of these blocks are a substitute for self-exclusion, but each one is a layer of friction an offshore casino has to design around.

The support services and the bank-side blocks are the parts of the system that work for an Australian punter regardless of which casino they are using. The licensed-operator protections — dispute resolution, payout guarantees, regulatory oversight — are the parts that do not extend offshore.

Frequently asked questions

How long does an Australian withdrawal actually take, once the offshore casino approves it?

The fastest plausible case is under a minute, when the casino releases the funds via Osko addressed to a PayID. Direct entry takes one to two business days. International bank wires can stretch to two to five business days even after the operator has pressed send. The casino’s own approval queue sits in front of all of these and is the variable the marketing page never names.

Is a “quick withdrawal” casino in Australia any different from a regular online casino?

Mechanically, no. The casino’s internal process is the same — KYC check, approval queue, payment-rail selection. The marketing difference is the operator’s stated commitment to a shorter processing window, supported by a payment rail that is genuinely fast on the Australian side. The regulatory difference is that a “quick withdrawal” casino is, in practice, almost always an offshore operator, and offshore operators sit outside the Australian licensing and complaints framework.

Do quick-withdrawal casinos targeting Australia actually use local payment rails?

Some do, and some do not. Listings reference PayID and ecoPayz in connection with Instant Casino, and PayID lets the sender see the recipient’s name before authorising the transfer — which is a feature AP+ itself describes as a defence against scam gambling sites. Other operators on this list have no third-party listings referencing local rails at all, and the deposit and withdrawal routes they offer are international wires and cryptocurrency.

How long does a quick win actually take to reach a withdrawal?

The win itself is credited to the casino wallet the moment the round settles, which is typically seconds. The delay sits in the withdrawal queue: the operator’s KYC and AML review, plus whatever processing window the operator’s terms state. A punter who has not completed KYC upfront will find the queue longer than the marketing page suggests.

Are slot withdrawals processed any faster than table-game withdrawals?

Not structurally. The difference, where one exists, is the operator’s own internal policy on win-size thresholds, where larger wins tend to trigger a more thorough AML review. The payment rail at the end of the queue is the same for both.

Is a “quick withdrawal” promise from an offshore casino something an Australian can rely on?

In the narrow sense that the Australian rails underneath are reliable, yes — PayID and Osko settle in under a minute. In the broader sense that the operator will release the funds within the time stated, no. The ACMA’s published enforcement record shows multiple formal warnings and blocking orders against operators in this exact market, and an Australian punter has no licensed complaints body to take a disputed withdrawal to. The promise is enforceable in the operator’s jurisdiction, not Australia’s, and the cost of enforcing it is rarely worth the disputed amount.