Topic: Bitstamp :( warnings and rejoinders. - page 2. (Read 4924 times)

Now that that milk has been spilled your recourse is reporting this to the police / hiring a lawyer. Next time do your due diligence, Bitstamp has been known for pulling this KYC scam trick since 2014 at least like in the link I posted above.

Different thread, similar issue: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/26apno/bitstamp_will_not_process_withdrawal_unless_you/

If you do decide to provide false documents, at least know what you're doing, unless the amount is small, contacting the police/lawyer would be more sensible.

My friend had some BTC converted to USD when Bitstamp bothered him with requirements which were impossible.  He had to simply buy back BTC and take the exchange hit both ways, but he was able to withdraw his funds in the form of BTC and move on to a different platform.

If Bitstamp will not release the value you sent them for custodial duty then they are probably guilty of theft.  The problem is that it would cost a fortune in legal fees to pursue legal remedy.  I suspect that Bitstamp have either fine print which their lawyers will claim gives them the right to steal from you under certain circumstances, or they have under-the-radar authorization (or instruction) to steal money in some conditions.  It is plain that they are highly influenced by those who control the USD monetary system, and they probably are not even allowed to elaborate on the nature of this control.

I do NOT suggest inventing data or documents to try to meet the impossible requirements.  I believe that doing will give them automatic reason and legal rational to take your money because you will be immediately guilty of a crime which is tied to your funds.

Best of luck.  Bitcoin was never promised to be 'easy' even if you are perfectly clear of any wrongdoing.  These are not problems with Bitcoin proper...In fact Bitcoin has always worked like a charm for me whereas the USD is an expensive-to-use fail.  These are specifically problems with fiat money systems and the corrupt legal system which backs them.

Hi guys,

First post here. I joined because I read some threads, especially the one by Cyper, where he had a similar money taken hostage situation. He managed to turn it around with a lot of letters but he had the documentation to support every single satoshi, I think.

A lot of early adopters don't have that. How are we supposed to have proof of where our coins came from when we just bought a few with cash in the mail or sent a small bank transfer from a guy that you knew from a forum that is now closed, and a bank account that is now closed? What if you bought from one of the many exchanges that closed down over the years? The list goes on.

The guys who founded Bitstamp were early adopters, so they should understand, but they don't.

I agree that we cannot provide false documents. But without all this crazy amount of proof Bitstamp is asking for, there is no way to get funds released.

Add to this the common complaint (see reddit, trustpilot, a few threads on this forum), that Bitstamp KYC agents straight up ignore you, sometimes indefinitely, other times for weeks on end.

I understand the "best just to walk away from them", but the problem is my coins are in the account and it's locked.

Whatever is happening at Bitstamp, whether it's understaffing, or a genuine scam, I am not sure, but it's not good for anyone. Don't make the mistake I did and don't deposit there. (No I didn't have any warning that they would freeze everything until I tried to withdraw...)

I don't really know what to do at this point. Their KYC agents basically locked my account with a message of a load of questions, I answered their questions, and it's been 2 months, so they're just straight up ignoring me. I called on the phone, 3 times last week. You can scream at customer support, you may as well scream in a big forest, because no one will hear you. They always say they will put me priority in the queue, no reply to my ticket to unlock my account, ever. So the KYC people I need to speak to are not even available to speak to. It seems a completely impossible situation. Right now I'm considering this as a theft, because Bitstamp KYC agents aren't even trying to engage with me. At least if they're asking me more and more questions I've got a chance to finally satisfy their ridiculous requirements. But there is 0 dialogue. The only people to write on my support ticket after the KYC agent locked the account was the person I spoke to on the phone, the regular customer support guys who have no power to do anything. They're just there to answer basic questions like "what is a bit-coin". Seriously.

Any advice from more experienced members would really be appreciated.

This is just bitstamp being bitstamp, next time please do some more due diligence:

Bitstamp - wanted to withdraw money and was hit with these weird KYC questions


I could, but not for USD.

If it's just for selling off coins and not day trading, then you can try localbitcoins in person cash trades. Especially after you have earned some positive feedback you can place ads and sell coins above the market price. I would stay away from bank transfers, or anything similar where someone could send you money from a compromised bank account.

I'm sure that is the case.

Bitstamp are asking for documents which cannot exist in the case of early adopters and miners.  Whether it is forced upon them by regulators or whether they simply don't have the ethics/acumen to implement a workable solution is unknown.  But it also doesn't matter much since there are other options and various work-arounds.

Note that if one tries to fabricate data, which seems to be the solution which occurs many people and is the only option available to continue to use their services, then Bitstamp will have the evidence to turn your perfectly legal coins into ones which can be classified as illegal for the purposes of AML.  Illegal on ANY platform.  Tainted.

I would gently suggest to my fellow early adopters to not fall into that trap and taint the pay-out of your visionary speculations.  And don't give Bitstamp or anyone else that ammo to use against you.  Evidence of criminal activity against a user is probably worth a lot more to Bitstamp than the fees they could generate by keeping you as a customer.  It's good trading stock to them in the 'regulatory market' as it has evolved.

they are most likely forced into compliance by police entities looking for money laundering and drug operations.

I differ with you on two points here:

First, I rather doubt that Bitstamp is real wild about what they are doing.  I think it is foisted upon them by a variety of parties one of them being the Luxembourg regulators.  I think it is highly unlikely that anyone will get any relief from said regulators.  Most probably one would end up with their names on even more secret lists.

Secondly, and much more importantly, I would strongly advise to NOT fabricate any data or records.  The simple reason for this is that according to every definition I've read including very specifically that produced by Bitstamp, money laundering is specific to criminal activity.  If your coins are not a result of illegal activity, they will be after you get done fabricating data associated with them as data fabrication is almost certain to be classified by most court systems as a crime in and of itself.

Best to just walk away from Bitstamp (or any exchange) after you've used them.  Look for other ways.  Bitstamp is but a used jizz rag to my friend, but my friend has other friends who can pull another clean tissue out of the same box.

Desperation to be 'compliant' even though there are countless companies out there dealing with much larger sums that never make demands of this nature.

No matter what happens I still ain't going anywhere near them.

If they demanded documents for my $20 bitcoins I'd whip up a fake electricity bill from 2011. If that didn't do it I'd go straight to their regulator in Luxembourg and make a noise.

When the time comes to sell I won't be bothering with any exchange. It'll be OTC only.

If 2017 nearly finished them, the next explosion will totally and completely paralyse all of them.

New issue with Bitstamp

Now they are bothering at least one person for 'documents' about where Bitcoin came from.  This person is not in Europe or in the United States and has nothing to do with either geographical area.

The thing is, for some people buying 10 BTC cost about $20 back in the day, and plenty of people obtained a ton of BTC from mining.  There would have been no reason to keep detailed records of anything back then.  Bitstamp was around back in those days and at least some of them should know this.  They keep bothering people with the same questions over and over again and threatening to hold back wire transfers unless information which doesn't make any sense (and is fairly private even if it did.)

What do people suppose is Bitstamp's game here?  Are they working for some entity to get sensitive information about people?  Are they under the thumb of some national or multi-national interests and forced to gather information about citizens from third countries?  Are they just accumulating data for their own use and/or sale?

Obviously anyone doing anything over trivial sums of BTC needs to have multiple exchanges to use.  Any recommendations which are working somewhat at this time?

The wires mentioned in opening this thread both cleared finally.  Maybe 10 days ago, but I forgot to update this thread.

My friend opened several tickets, one for each wire, and requested they not be closed until the money was accounted for.  Bitstamp seemed to have honored this request more or less.

I think it sucks that Bitstamp:

 - takes a fair amount of time to hand off wire requests to their 'processor'.

 - closes wire requests as 'finished' when they make the hand-off rather than when their processor actually attempts the wire.

 - seems to have no visibility into the workings of the processor and no way to do any sort of tracking, feedback, or updates.

 - keeps the 'processor' invisible to the customer thereby keeping 10's of thousands USD in a black hole for weeks or months at a time.  One senses that if the processor felt like simply absconding with them money, that could easily happen with no recourse for the customer.  Possibly no recourse for Bitstamp either.  With things being completely secret and invisible it is really difficult to understand how much influence even Bitstamp has in the matter.

So, Bitstamp, I suggest that you improve your process flow for wire transfers in order to provide a better level of service for your customers.  Just a friendly suggestion, and I'll certainly be checking back before mentioning your name in the future when someone asks me about potential exchange service providers.

An international wire NOT attempted through Bitstamp just cleared into my friend's account with the same information supplied to Bitstamp.  The entire process took under two days including whatever holds were applied by the SE Asian bank.  This proves that the information supplied was not a problem and the recipient's bank/bank account has no problems.  If Bitstamp tries that excuse on my friend we'll know it's BS.

I feel for people who don't have an extra 5-figure sum kicking around to adjust for Bitstamp failures (and perhaps losses?) and were relying on Bitstamp's capabilities as part of a necessary business transaction.  There must be plenty   It's always good to have a backup option whenever dealing with any fiat money systems.  Crypto-currencies are vastly more reliable in my now rather long experience with both.

Another amusing thing I ran across in my research:

  https://www.reddit.com/r/RippleTalk/comments/9ue3dd/bitstamp_has_a_new_official_subreddit/

This from just a few days ago.  Looks to me as though Bitstump is interested in being able to edit and delete the complaints which are now pouring in.  Another non-good sign.  Seems like they've forgotten about bitcointalk.org since I've seen no comment from them at all.  (They used to have employees who were actually moderators of this forum.)  I thought maybe they would at least grace us with some of their standard boilerplate bullshit but no joy.

In researching the presumed 'payment processor' who is reported to be at the root of the problem, I found this:

  https://www.xtrm.com/web/Fastrak/connect.aspx

on a standard Google search.  Lol!  It seems to give a list of the Slavs who would have certain admin privs at Bitstump.  Thanks, XTRM, for showing us a list of people who could likely tar up high quality identity theft kits for all of Bitstump's users and take them along on their way out the door.

A 'payment processor' who is so loose with information should probably not be trusted with more than about 10 cents.

It happened in 2017 before the bull run took off, and I can even remember similar delays going back to 2016.

Thanks for bringing that up. I never took the cold wallet metric seriously till I started to notice how correlated the complaints around Bitfinex and the outflow of capital was during their recent banking problems.

I'll keep using Bitstamp as fiat entry point because it's the most convenient option for me, and I'm already verified there. Another thing is that the last time I withdrew fiat was back in 2015 so whatever is going on in the background, it's not and won't be affecting me personally.

The only case I encountered this year was this:

[BITSTAMP] problem -- Multi-deposits through one deposit request

But it is very strange that suddenly their clients have many complaints, here are people who are complaining and they are responding, see here:

https://www.trustpilot.com/review/bitstamp.net

According to this reddit post:

  https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitstamp/comments/9uf6kt/psa_for_those_waiting_on_bitstamp_funds/

Bitstump's "new payment processor" and presumably the ones who are responsible for all the delays and grief for all involved would the this outfit:

  https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/xtrm#section-overview

No idea how accurate it is.  If anyone anywhere _has_ been getting money wired, I suppose that reference to this shop may show up somewhere on the tracking information.

One would presume that Bitstump has handed the fiat over to this outfit and they continue to sit on it.  It could be good to know if Bitstump goes completely dark.

Glad to do it.

By way of due diligence before suggesting to my friend to give Bitstump a try I came here to bitcointalk.org to see if there were any known current problems.  Unfortunately I saw none.

I also didn't notice the Bitstump issues strewn throughout Reddit because I don't use that platform very much.  I guess I should put it on my watch list for Bitcoin related stuff   I hate the way those fuckers are gung-ho about censorship of badthink and are joining hands with their brethren (Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc, etc) in our so-called 'free countries' here in the 'developed world' to facilitate it.  So, I cringe whenever I see their text string grace my URL window.  Oh well.  at least I don't have to have an account with them to see their specially curated approved-for-sheeple content.  Yet.

Bitstamp isn't nested as firmly in this ecosystem like Bitfinex, and there is less to fud about with how people consider Bitstamp to be one of the most reliable exchanges in the industry.

Whales are the first to exit an exchange when they start to feel that things might turn ugly, which immediately results in the cold wallets of that exchange to shrink, and that's exactly what happened to Bitfinex.

https://bitinfocharts.com/bitcoin/address/3Nxwenay9Z8Lc9JBiywExpnEFiLp6Afp8v

As long as Bitstamp's cold wallet holdings hover between 90-100k BTC there isn't much to worry about.

The problems at Bitstamp seem really bad. I had no idea since I don't look at Reddit these days. Thanks for posting this, tvbcof.

There's many dozens of complaints about missing bank wires and SEPA transfers, and they go back to at least July. At first, I thought the issues had to do with a sloppy transition given the recent acquisition. But then I realized how far the complaints go back. It's getting to Gox-level delays now.

I'm surprised there's no disparity developing between Stamp and the other exchanges. When this kind of FUD happens to Bitfinex -- well, just look at what happened on October 14th when they disabled fiat deposits. USDT hit 85 cents that day on Kraken.


When was that? I've never heard of delays like this at Coinbase. If the delay was a matter of days or even a few weeks, particularly during high volume times like the second half of last year, there could be legitimate reasons for it.

At first, I took the comparisons to Mt. Gox as hyperbole. After looking into this, I would immediately buy BTC and withdraw all funds, if I had funds at Bitstamp right now.

Don't use Bitstamp.  They are currently not performing USD fiat withdrawals. My guess is some kind of money crunch or theft that they refuse to publicize. There are people that have been waiting over 2 months for their funds to be moved out of Bitstamp. There are people looking to spearhead a class action lawsuit against them.

there are tons of people having issues.  see https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitstamp/ and https://www.reddit.com/r/BitstampOfficial/

I used to be a supporter of Bitstamp, not any more.  The past few months something has been going on with Bitstamp and they won't be forthcoming with the truth.  All you will get is excuses and delay tactics.