Let me first introduce myself. I am Jouke Hofman, co founder and co owner of bitonic.nl . We provide an easy and fast solution to buy bitcoins in the Netherlands. We have been operating our business for just over a half year. We have done over a thousand bitcoin transactions, and that number is increasing at ever faster rates every month.
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We are still working on somehow resolving this issue, but we wanted to tell the community about this, just to get it off our chest. As I said, we spend a lot of time and money (still are) in trying to fix the broken system of the banks and this is how they treat us.
We had the exact same problem a few months ago. What happened is that the bank account we used at the time got blacklisted by the Crédit Agricole bank. As a consequence, our customers could simply not wire money anymore to us,
this thread followed the issue.
That was a retarded situation. But we won and got it unlocked unconditionnally (as I said in thursday's announcement lots of the work we do is unseen).
My advice is the following : Leverage all the contacts you have there, we reported some phished bank accounts to the Crédit Agricole before getting blocked, so we had a couple phone numbers. Call these contacts, every day, I repeat
every fucking day, don't let go of them, escalate the issue and talk to the boss, talk to the boss's boss. Be polite, explain politely that it's not acceptable, explain politely that you are losing business because of them, insist heavily on this fact. Insist that this absolutely not acceptable, that the issue is on their side, not yours. Remind them of how you helped them improve their security (in our case we reminded them of the money that didn't get stolen thanks to our phished accounts reports). A bank gives no shit whatsoever, but individual contacts will be embarassed, use this, insist, call again, and again, and again. Don't threaten them directly, but make it clear that it is not going to be tolerated, that a solution has to be found. That a bank can not simply shut a legitimate business down by cutting its funding. Use the embarassment of the individuals you'll have on the phone.
Call again and again. If they say they're going to get back to you ask them when, and if they don't call back you call them.
Be patient, you'll win. It took us
a full month, but we won.
I hear there's a bank in France...
Yeah, and trust me, we know our shit.