Topic: ChangeNow.io Illegally holding my 10Ethereum for months and Failed to cooperate (Read 315 times)

@AbuBhakar, ChangeNow team received all the details needed to identify the transaction, after that they  requested proof of ownership, Law Enforcement involvement, also requested "Return of Stolen Funds letter" and that all indicates that the Funds are in their hands.


When I Contacted Binance, They told me straight forward that the funds are not with them,and they redirected me to ChangeNow.

Tell me, Why ChangeNow didnt  just say the funds are not with them ... why they requested proofs and other staff to return the funds.

Not many crypto users are aware that the address belong to them because it is not registered under their name. Do read the comment on Etherscan.io where you can see that many victims lost their coins to that address

https://etherscan.io/address/0xa305fab8bda7e1638235b054889b3217441dd645#comments

It is clear ChangeNow not willing to refund/return my hard earned money and It is considered as a Crime and A Disgrace For Crypto.

I followed every protocol designated to me by ChangeNow.io and at the End They failed to follow their own protocol.  What a Disgrace for Crypto!

Binance made it clear that ChangeNow are the one who needs to Refund/Return the funds because they are the final destination of the funds.

Binance said that the reciever is a binance account owned by ChangeNow

With the Law Enforcement request , Binance can Freeze ChangeNow assets including the innocents users , in this scenario innocent users will get involved and have their funds frozen and no one wants that really.

ChangeNow has to cooperate and act like a Legit Exchange/Firm .

Maybe "privacy" is their reason even though it's actually not a good attitude to hide their identity (evidence) in situations where they are suspected of being in a theft circle.

If they are willing to refund your money through legal procedures then that's great for you. This might happen if changenow has actually postponed the exchange process because you reported it earlier or they have different exchange instruments for high amounts.

I would say that all these requests that they sent to the OP are in fact just a certain protocol. will pay the money if the police find that he is with them and they have not sent another currency in exchange, which I guess is a very small probability.
they certainly have some obligation to communicate with users and to provide support.

I would say that they also run the whole case quite amateurishly, they had to seek proof of ownership of the compromised ETH address (which would be very difficult for the OP to prove, given that it is an address from Coinbase) as well as many things.

MI21 why don't you ask Binance for a refund of those funds? This address is hosted on his platform, right? If you accuse ChangeNow although they were only a passage for the transaction, just as much Binance participated in everything.

What you need to understand is that ChangeNow.io Denied that they are the final destination to the Stolen Funds until Binance colleagues Exposed them.
 Explain To us, Why do you think ChangeNow.io denied that the address belong to them? Why did ChangeNow didnt admit it until I sent proofs from Binance that the address belong to them?

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From what i can understand, ChangeNow is not supposed to return back the stolen money as you explained. ChangeNow sent an equivalent amount to 10 Eth in other currency to someone else (maybe not the hacker himself).
If Op's story is correct, why they ask for Return fund letter and refuse to response to police demand? Why this shady behavior !?
ChangeNow can't refund the affected person because it's not their responsabilities, but at least, it should help investigation.
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Let me keep it simple for you all: After sending all the details to ChangeNow.io to identify the transaction, ChangeNow.io team made it clear that Refund will  be issued Once the police involved because they needed to comply to their policies. It means one thing which is that after ChangeNow team identified the transaction and found that the funds are with them/.

So why did they request "Return of Stolen Assets" letter?

If ChangeNow didnt have the funds, they could simply say that they dont have the funds ,

 Why would they ask for Law Enforcement Request to Return the Funds?

ChangeNow made a decision to return the funds and By Not doing so , they are Violating their Own Policies/Refund Policies,Seychelles policies .




 

From what i can understand, ChangeNow is not supposed to return back the stolen money as you explained. ChangeNow sent an equivalent amount to 10 Eth in other currency to someone else (maybe not the hacker himself).
If Op's story is correct, why they ask for Return fund letter and refuse to response to police demand? Why this shady behavior !?
ChangeNow can't refund the affected person because it's not their responsabilities, but at least, it should help investigation.

Changenow is an exchange. It's true that they have received those 10 ETH. But they have sent another cryptocurrency to the hacker.

I have a question for you.
If someone steals your money and buys a car with that, who should return the money to you? The car seller or the thief?

The reddit post was created in March 2022 after ChangeNow refuse to comply to their own policies. I provided ChangeNow reddit representative/Mod the ticket number and from the ticket number you can access all the info about my case and his reply was that the team still working on it,,
ChangeNow Mod, Locked the reddit thread without solving the case and he/she banned/censored me because they he/she know that I am right and they are the wrong

Let me Elaborate more for better understanding :

July 2021 : ChangeNow Colleagues made it clear that they will only issue the refund once the police involved.(Based on their Seychelles Policies)
Sep 2021 : ChangeNow Colleagues made a decision to return the funds and asked to provide them with "REturn of Stolen Funds" letter.

March 2022: reddit post

Again the reddit post is the outcome of ChangeNow failing to comply to their own policies and its not the first time Victims complaining about them..

 

After Providing ChangeNow with all the details needeed to identify the transaction, it was clear that the funds was with them thats why they claim to refund. On Etherscan.io we can see that ChangeNow sent 32ETH including my 10 Ethereum to Binance .

As you can , I already mentioned that ChangeNow failed to provide the CyberCrime investigators with any info.

and on march 16, 2022 you sent your proof of ownership?

Apparently, before this, you only sent them the ETH address in question which has thousands of other transactions hence there's now way they would promise to return your funds without being able to pinpoint which one of them was yours. In addition, they would also need a more viable proof of ownership other than an ETH address which I'm guessing wasn't provided until March 16, 2022.

March 2, 2022 from a changenow reddit mod:


Fast forward, after pinpointing which one of the thousands of transactions is yours, they come to a conclusion that the trade has been long completed and they do not withhold such funds anymore. I'll say it again but I don't think they are responsible for such thing.

Once the trade made by the thief is completed, Changenow doesn't have your coins anymore. I wonder why they claim to refund you.
From what i can expect ; At best cases, Changenow may accept give you (upon official request made by your authorities) info revealing the identity of the thief.

(11:17:03)   Tim: We understand you, the team already knows about this situation and we are all waiting for a police request on the problem. We are so sorry that this happened.
ChangeNOW Support Team

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Guys, its clear that ChangeNow stated that Refund will be issued once the police involved.

I think you might misunderstood me so let me elaborate more :
On March 2021 : ChangeNow requested police involvement to return the funds and as you can see they wanted to comply with Seychelles policies
On Sep 2021 : ChangeNow team Asked to provide them with "Return of Stolen Funds" letter

Do take take into consideration that the Law Enforcement involved and ChangeNow failed to provide the Cybercrime Investigator with info .

I read all your posts in this topic and I feel you misunderstood them. They didn't really promise to refund you.
They only asked you to make a request and tell them why you believe that they should refund you. This doesn't mean they promised to send those 10 ETH to you.

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It's unlikely that he/she has exchanged those 10 ETH for fiat. There's a big possibility that they have been exchanged for another cryptocurrency.

Helping to solve your problem doesn't mean they are willing to refund you, what they are doing is complying with any requests by the compliance department for further investigation. I'm just assuming if your 10 eth ends up in the changenow's binance wallet, they have it as a liquidity reserve. The thief exchanged it for fiat and changenow had the bank details.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereumnoobies/comments/te0q6k/comment/i12wrw2/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

Was this before you sent your proof of ownership?

Here is what ChangeNow team member wrote to me before:

(11:05:59)   Tim: Please understand that we have to comply with Seychelles legislation, as well as with our own internal policies. Those policies state that, without a proper police request, we're not obligated to transfer any suspected assets from our cold wallet storage to anyone. As soon as we receive an official request from the police, we'll gladly assist you in this matter.

Unless they said it directly, I wouldn't say changenow "promised" and "insisted" to give your funds back. Involving law enforcemnt for this type of case is the standard for most centralized exchanges. Changenow requesting such letter isn't a strong evidence that they are still withholding your coins. Honestly, they can just say it's a case of poor support or they're just trying to collect required legal documents (as per their policy) as they work on your case.

I don't really see how changenow should be responsible if a scammer completed a trade in their platform. You could say they are lying about not withholding the said funds anymore but you're gonna need a stronger evidence for that.

All the proofs were sent to ChangeNow team by myself and by the police,

Do read the comments on Reddit link attached previously where you can see that  proofs of ownership and proof of the unauthorized transaction provided to ChangeNow and /u/ethreumnoobies Mod.