Hi guys,
It's Nimi from Coinmama here.
I'll address the things NevilleRosalesfqkduw mentioned in Red below each paragraph;
Do not work with CoinMamma. At least they are not serious, and at worse they are fraudulent guys. I have following story with them. I needed to pay with BitCoin for my hosting. Such payment must be made on time of course, it can not wait. So, I decided to try "officially licensed" seller with "good reputation". It is CoinMamma, of course, it is #1 result in Google for "buy bitcoin", so what may be better?
Coinmama has been operating since 2013 and has managed to preserve a good, positive reputation in a tough neighborhood, thanks to our fast and safe service within the Bitcoin community. I think you may have jumped the gun, calling us "fraudulent guys", especially as we'll see below how this story unfolds.
I registered. They ask to upload my documents (driver license) scan copy. Well, ok, they exchange money for me, so I can understand why do they need it. Anyway, it is bad idea to upload your documents to man in Internet who you don't know at all, and you don't know how can he use your documents, for example, can he register himself on another site with your documents? Well, he is "officially licensed", so of course not.
That is a real concern and a good one, when giving away any personal info online, there will always have to be some trust involved. We also agree that in some cases it makes less sense, however when it comes to Bitcoin, it's not an odd request at all. In order to comply with the law we are required to identify our clients. Whether you'd like to share the info or not, is entirely up to you.
Next day after documents uploading they say that I am verified. Well, I have some days before hosting payment, so I am happy. I start to place order. Wow, for 0.2 bitcoins they want USD 65. Usual price was USD 50 at that time. Why is it so expensive? Well, of course, "officially licensed" company with "good reputation" may be more expensive, however, you get better service as a compensation. So I agreed. Next step is SMS verification. Is it OK to give your phone number to man you don't know? The question is rhetorical one. OK, I agree.
CoinMama offers a number of methods of payment. In your case, you chose to buy Bitcoins with credit card. If in fact these numbers are correct and you calculated a 15 dollar delta, please know that there is a minimum fee of $10 from the credit card processor(which you have been notified of prior to submitting the payment form) not CoinMama, which raises the cost when using this method of payment. The credit card processor is also responsible for SMS verification. Both events occur in order to prevent fraud and charge backs, enabling CC payments in the bitcoin sphere. We're hoping for less friction in the future.
I see the message now "sorry, your payment may be delayed up to 17 hours due to overload". Hm... I need to pay for hosting, I can not wait, and it is not good for company with "good reputation". OK, I agree to wait (I don't have choice, they blocked funds on my credit card already).
If to be exact, the message was; "Current payment requests will be queued and handled in X hours. You may experience delays on some occasions. You may continue and submit the payment as usual and we will process it as soon as possible.". This message was shown to you prior to completing the payment form. Which makes a big difference to your argument. This means that we notified you, explaining that your order may take longer than usual, giving you the choice to make a decision, to either continue with us or to buy somewhere else. Furthermore, your money was never blocked. You could have reached out to us and ask for the payment to be cancelled, it would have happened quickly.
I went to sleep, and next day I have to pay for my hosting. However, I see incoming email message when I stand up. And it says that: "Your payment request from CoinMama has been declined. Note that we do not disclose the cause of declined payments." Fortunately they refund my money.
It wasn't really fortune, that's just what legitimate companies do. Of course we'll return money that wasn't exchanged for Bitcoins. The question is - why did you get declined?
Ops. So, how to pay for hosting? And why did they steal 2 days of my time?
In most cases, payments are declined due to fraud suspicion.
From legal point of view they actually gain my driver license, phone number and email by deceit, because they claimed they need this information to sell me bitcoins, and they actually don't do that, they just got my documents, and it is a big question why do they need them if you don't sell me anything.
As you did not manage to complete your order, we do not "need" to keep a record of your documents. If you'd like to try out our service again, you're welcome to give us a go, your account is verified. However, if you no longer wish to use our service, simply send us an email requesting to delete your account and we'll permanently deleted all your records.
OK, I decided to contact them to solve the problem somehow. I go to contact form, write them about my issue and click Send. Now, I see following message:
SQLSTATE[HY000] [2002] An operation on a socket could not be performed because the system lacked sufficient buffer space or because a queue was full.
Wow!!! Theirs contact form doesn't even work. They stole my documents, and they even don't want to simulate they will read my support request.
During the past couple of days we experienced a major DDOS attack. During this time which was unfortunately long, the website suffered several issues including downtime which led to the message mentioned above. We're sorry some of our users saw this nasty error and have already fixed it. We understand it came a bad time and contributed to your confusion, but these things happen and we can only do our best to prevent them from happening again.
Conclusion: remember my story and double think before you'll work with them. May be you'll be lucky and you'll have better experience. And may be not. May be you'll waste some days, and you'll get one more fraudulent company that owns your personal ID copy. You have to decide it for yourself.
Our conclusion is: CoinMama is here for the long run. CoinMama's target is to offer the easiest way to buy Bitcoins. You don't get far screwing over clients for a couple of dollars a day. We're here to keep on serving our Bitcoin community loyally. We're working on improving our service and reducing our fees and hope to keep on serving you all for many years to come!
Best,
Nimi
CoinMama