At the first sight, cex.io is a nice place, providing full stack of services like exchange, trading, margin trading and, what is very much sought after, a convenient way to withdraw fiat funds to a banking card with a fee as low as $3.80.
What's even better, they seem to have an incredibly good BTC/USD rate at their exchange!
At the time of writing:
cex.io 2732.9479
kraken 2650.010
btc-e 2626.001
At times the difference reaches 10%, isn't there a way to do arbitrage even with all the fees you have to pay? Easy money.
Well, not really. Remember the "too good to be true" principle?
It happens to be more like a flytrap for inexperienced people who decided they want to participate in cryptocurrency hype.
You deposit bitcoins there, sell them for a higher price than you bought them for, now time to cash out, right?
Now, to make a withdrawal, first you need to complete the verififcation of your payment card to send the money to. Okay, fine - KYC/AML process. But this takes several days.
Then there is a daily limit of $500 for the withdrawal (and a monthly limit of $2000), unless you do the verification of your personal details. Maybe some time ago this verification was being done quicker, but now this takes multiple weeks.
Then, the main thing people tends to not notice because they don't read terms of use - these terms of use set the timeframe for fiat withdrawal as up to 1 month(!!). There is a review on trustpilot where someone had to wait for at least 38 days, while bombarding cex.io support with messages. This is an unreasonable delay, a magnitude greater than the other places (e.g. 72 hours on btc-e).
A cherry on a cake - they charge you storage fees for currency in your account! Wat? Who else does this? I don't know.
For example, if you exchanged BTC for USD there, you will be charged 2 USD per day. Yeah, charged every day you wait for payment card verification or personal details verification, every day you wait for fiat withdrawal to complete.
I'm not affiliated with any competitors of cex.io, I just don't like businesses treating their customers as idiots. Read the reviews on Trustpilot, it is full of funny stories about withdrawal or deposit, current rating of cex.io is 4.1 out of 10 (and it was 4.6 just a week ago or so).
Two remarks:
1. I don't think that the high BTC/USD rate is "a flytrap for inexperienced people who decided they want to participate in cryptocurrency hype". Only people who already have BTC can potentially profit from a high BTC/USD rate. People that are new to the crypto currency space first have to buy, and for this a high BTC/USD rate is disadvantageous. So, the high BTC/USD rate is a consequence of the withdrawal delays (and not vice versa).
2. Wherefrom do you have the information regarding the storage fees? I never was charged such fees.
Storage fees only start to kick in if you haven't signed in or deposited into your account for 6 months. No need to worry much about that, if u don't intend to use CEX as wallet. Still, main concern is fiat withdrawals. Waaaaaay to long. They need to do something about it
Kaboria is right, storage fees will apply after 6 months of inactivity, so its not that bad as I thought, excerpt from the terms of use:
In case if it has been more than six (6) month since the User signed in with his/her Account or made the Funds deposit, CEX.IO has the right to qualify this Account as abandoned. In that case Storage fee will be applied to such Account with seven (7) days prior email notification to the User. CEX.IO will charge the Storage fee set forth herein. Abandoned Accounts with zero balances shall be deactivated.
HPt, indeed, you will profit from high BTC/USD rate if you exchange BTC to USD and not the other way around. But having BTC doesn't make you experienced yet. What I meant is - a random newbie googles how to exchange fiat currency to BTC, performs the exchange which is easy to do nowadays, and then goes to cex.io.
About the high rate being is a consequence of withdrawal delays... hmm... maybe you're right, not sure. While I understand that a user, disappointed in how slow his withdrawal goes, may want to cancel it and revert back to BTC, creating upwards pressure in rates, there is a counteracting force represented by the newcomers, attracted by the high rates, who would apply the downwards pressure by their demand to sell BTC, right? So the price will stay high up only if there are significantly more people who wants to get their crypto back and get the hell outta there. Maybe if we get a historic prices chart on cex.io and align it with the statistics on withdrawal-related complaints, it would clear something up - personally I'm still inclined to think that the discrepancy isn't entirely natural.
But interestingly, even if you're right, come to think of it, this doesn't make it not being a flytrap for inexperienced people, it just makes it a self-sustaining flytrap
