Hei, I'm Catherine R. Ducharme. Evidently most people just call me Mike or "the Finn who knows exactly how many seconds it takes Veikkaus' competitors to push money to OP at 03:33 on a random Tuesday in Rovaniemi."
I grew up in Espoo, just west of Helsinki, in a house where the sauna was always hotter than the Wi-Fi password was long. My dad was a Nokia network guy back when that meant something, and my mum taught computer science at the local lukio, so by age ten I was already flashing custom ROMs on whatever Android brick I could get my hands on and writing tiny bots to auto-claim free spins from the sketchy Flash casinos of 2010. Classic Finnish childhood.
I did my MSc in Software Engineering at Aalto University, then spent eight years building the exact systems I now love to break in Helsinki and Malta: BankID logins that feel instant until you actually win, the "withdrawal pending up to 24 h" timers that always seem to hit 23:59:59, and the hidden 5× max-win caps that only appear after you've cleared the kierrätys. I've even written some of the code that I now screenshot and shame publicly.
In 2024 I took over the entire tech and real-money testing stack at Kolikkopeleja.com. We're the brutally honest Finnish slot and casino guide that refuses to rank anything we haven't personally deposited at with real Finnish BankID, spun hundreds or thousands of times on - from Lapland 4G, Helsinki fiber, and even the VR train between Tampere and Oulu just to be extra difficult - and successfully cashed out from, multiple times, at weird hours, with a stopwatch and a scary amount of receipts.
My official title is "Lead Engineer & Head of Verified Testing", which means I keep a wall of 70+ real devices (iPhone 16 on Elisa, Pixel 9 on DNA, a couple of ancient Lumias for pain tolerance), run Rust scrapers that validate every bonus code and Veikkaus-exempt license every 12 minutes, automate full Siru → wager → instant bank withdrawal cycles with Playwright and personally maintain the public payout leaderboard that Finns screenshot more than the actual game thumbnails. If someone suddenly decides weekends are "manual only", the entire country knows before morning puuro.
When I am not arguing with support in perfect Uusimaa slang about why my perfectly legit 520 000 € Book of Dead hit triggered "epäilyttävä pelikäyttäytyminen", you'll find me fat-biking on sea ice at sunrise, pulling 92 °C light roasts on my Decent machine, or deliberately bonus-buying at 200 € spins just to see how fast they actually pay when an Espoo guy hits big.