Never heard of an exchange asking for a refundable security deposit in coin listing but if that's a big exchange like you mentioned, I don't see any problem with that as no way they will put their name on becoming sh*t as it will ruin their reputation.
But anyways, can you disclose in public the name of the exchange? We can get a better response from the community if the name of the exchange will be mentioned. And are you sure you are dealing with their legit representative?
I have actually dumped the people I was talking too, because of suspicion of scam. The exchange was Bithumb.
I also doubt that big exchanges would charge a security deposit of 4 BTC (lot of money) and refund it later. I guess that once you have sent the 4 BTC, you will never heard about these people.
I do not have 4 BTC anyway, so the discussion was over. But I am still doubtful, I haven't seen articles or reports about these kind of practices, so if it is a sophisticated scam, it is good to report it here and let people know, to avoid some people losing all to these scammers.
This is more than suspicious. I doubt you will find anyone on this forum who had to provide a security deposit. What was the reason they mentioned? Just to get started trading over there at Bithumb? Usually they aren't scammers, maybe you didn't even talk to people from Bithumb and fell victim for phishing?
I was contacted via Discord. Then they asked me to fill a very simple listing form at @bithumbcorp.com website. Their emails were
[email protected] and everything sounded legit.
They said that they passed the project review (took a week).
Then they created a Telegram account to ask some questions (3 people were there)... the conversation ended up talking about a deposit of 4 BTC for legal reason in case the coin has some litigation issues. This is when I felt the scam and stopped everything.
It is not the first time that I am contacted by people claiming this kind of security deposit, so I immediately catched up the scam.
I have since investigated the emails I received and they were forged, using
"Received: from wgh24.whogohost.com (wgh24.whogohost.com [23.94.191.186])"
You need to read the headers of the email to find the forgery, so it is quite a sophisticated scam, that involves several people and running for weeks.
I am 100% certain now that it is a scam, I am web dev for +20 years and these are very well crafted scam, not your regular Nigerian guy.
I would advise all coin developers to NEVER send BTC for listing your coin. Use USDT instead and be sure that they do an invoice from inside the exchange, that you can pay from money transfered to the exchange first.
Every transaction outside the exchange is suspicious.
Every transaction in BTC cannot be blocked.
USDT has a way to block a transaction and restore the funds, not BTC.
That's my conclusion about this event.
I also was scammed by people using a kucoin domain that was using a different type of i (using ì instead in the domain name. They had re-created almost all the visual for the exchange using kucoìn.com domain. On my 4K monitor I cannot see the difference with the original domain.
So guys be careful, these scams are very sophisticated even for web veterans.