Once upon a time, MtGox was a BIG exchange and messed up by doing a small mistake: putting all user deposits in the company's hot wallet which leaked and leaked up to a bankruptcy point ....
As a consequence by revealing the fact that bitcoin is vulnerable in its borders(exchanges), its price fallen down to the earth from the sky and remained there for almost 2 years! Japanese authorities came to the scene and did their job as expected ...
it was an earthquake, initiated by a mistake not even an intentional fraud plot and yet ...
Now we have Bittrex, currently, one of the largest exchanges in the world and it is not about a technical mistake but a deliberate, sophisticated series of fraud and scamming people by the site owner(s), thousands of users have been affected and millions of dollars have been gone into the packets of the thieves who are not responsive at all and has sufficed to make a very short misleading statement of no help, saying :"it is about 0.1% of the users" and doesn't say anything rational about why and how they have blocked users access to their funds.
Meanwhile their agents informally make false claims about a mysterious pressure by unknown authorities from unknown countries which is threatening the whole firm and its users and they have sacrificed those 0.1% to make their majesty happy and save the majority! Their support is totally dead, they have targeted the most weakest portion of the users, Iranians (like me) , users from Middle East, Eastern Europe, ... or users with very huge (for an exchange user) deposits.
The scam scenario:
1- In October 12 (or so) Bittrex changed its withdrawal policy, overnight, without any prior warning. As a result users with 'basic verification level' (verified minimally by e-mail) was no longer able to withdraw any funds. These users were able to withdraw up to 1 btc/day prior to the scam.
2- At the same time Bittrex invented a new term 'disabled account' and put thousands of the users on this state. This trick was applied to the users who couldn't be scammed by the first trick because they have passed the more advanced verification step, (they have been chosen deliberately for the scam based on nationality, deposit level, .. ).
3- Plus, Bittrex invented a new rule for a 'disabled account': you can't close it (claiming your deposit) before withdrawing all of your deposit and you can't do that either because it is 'disabled'.
4-Bittrex robotic support, asks the victims to supply a foolish selfie, which of course has no effect on the situation, support is dead, forever.
Now, 45 days is passed and thousands of users have lost millions of dollars, no support, no apologies, nothing!
I started this topic not only to keep pressure on the Bittrex and warn users but also for a more important purpose: to ask WHY?
Why the community remains silent?
Why the authorities do nothing?
Why bittrex is up and running?
What has changed so bad that a scandal like this does not stop btc price to go higher?
Isn't it about we, bitcoiners, preferring to remain in the denial phase and afraid of seeing the ugly face of our market which is full of, (actually overloaded by) scammers and opportunists who do not care about anything or anyone other than their fat ass?
Aren't we, most of us, a light version of such an opportunist, fat, greedy asswhole, who just have come to this market to harvest easy money and do not see anything beyond our nose?
Isn't it what makes us indifferent to the Bittrex scam?
When are we really going to stop seeing issues like this with exchanges? It is becoming alarming and until we start having decentralized exchanges before we can really be conveniently trading on any exchange. It is normal that once an exchange is receiving some hype as the best, they tend to just do something silly and not right.
How will you just confiscate user's asset without prior warning. Things are not done that way. I am not affected and even though I am an enhanced user, but something like this means it could have happened to just about anyone. This is just crazy.