JUST received an email from Bittrex
Over the past couple of months, Bittrex has been in the process of improving its identity verification procedures. There are a number of reasons to improve our processes, including that improved identity procedures help protect Bittrex users from theft and fraud, and prevent abuse of the Bittrex platform. In addition, Bittrex must comply with the Bank Secrecy Act, U.S. economic sanctions laws, and other legal and regulatory requirements. Bittrex takes these compliance obligations seriously. We are committed to making sure our services are not used to launder money, support terrorism, commit fraud or other illegal activities.
We understand that our verification process can be frustrating or a hassle. We have heard your complaints and are working promptly to address each individual support ticket in our system. But, we cannot do this without the help of our customers. We have provided below a list of common mistakes or issues that arise during our improved identity verification process that tends to increase the delay in completing the process successfully:
Creating multiple accounts associated with a single individual or entity: Unless you have received prior approval from Bittrex, our system will disable all additional accounts associated with a single individual or entity. This issue needs to be resolved manually by our support staff. Given the necessity of manual intervention and the number of tickets we have received lately, there have been significant delays in resolving these issues. Please do not create multiple accounts.
Name mismatch: If your government issued ID has a different name than the one you provided to Bittrex, your account will not be able to withdraw funds until we resolve the name mismatch. This issue needs to be resolved manually by our support staff. Given the necessity of manual intervention and the number of tickets we have received lately, there have been significant delays in resolving these issues.
Unreadable IDs: If your ID is not readable or otherwise unable to be verified as a legitimately issued government ID, we will not allow you to proceed with our improved identity verification process. Please ensure that the picture of your government issued ID is clear.
Non-Latin characters on the Government IDs: There are some countries where government IDs do not support the Latin character set. For these IDs, there are additional steps that Bittrex will need to take to verify the information on the ID, often including manual intervention. Given the number of tickets we have received lately, there have been significant delays in resolving these issues. Using international passports generally makes the process move more smoothly as these passports support Latin characters.
Opening multiple support tickets: We have noticed that users are opening multiple tickets with regards to the same issue. While we understand that the delay can be frustrating, please do not open multiple tickets for the same issue as this will cause your support request to be delayed.
Although this is not an exhaustive list, we wanted to provide some context for the delay in responding to individual support tickets. We trust that you understand Bittrex is committed to following the law and ensuring that it has a robust compliance program. We ask for your patience and cooperation throughout this process.
The Bittrex Team
Is it just me, Or at this point I dont give a crap about their excuses and just want it FIXED.... This email would have been MUCH better timed being sent out over a month ago.... But no resolution's offered?!
If this is true and If they just would have communicated this in public, the problem would be a lot less for them.
Also, they should have notified the user base about holding funds for hostage before the actual act (giving people a chance to withdraw). Money laundering policies should be taken only when fiat is withdrawn, most countries have those, if a country has such policies not in place, lock accounts, refund funds AND close the accounts.
Make a statement that if someone does not want to go through the verification process, give the option to close accounts and return funds.
These are all no-brainers. If shit hits the fan, communication becomes important. Compare this with how BTC-e handled communication when they went belly up.
