(sorry for the following essay
)
Taken from
https://poloniex.com/press-releases/2017.06.07-Improving-Our-Support-Capacity/These level 2 verification requests are PURE PROFIT for Poloniex since if Poloniex is legit this means more trading volume.
If they are like most startups I know they would just do 1 minute quick checks to satisfy the nominal requirements and then click "accept".
If they didn't have enough people they'd hire people off the street for $10/hr to click "accept". Money, money, money.
So Occam's razor says the feet-dragging on verifications is to avoid withdrawals.
They have reduced withdrawal fees (for Ether at least - but still more expensive than using Ethereum chain directly) but having to do $2k transactions for X days does certainly gets expensive for the user. Poloniex purposely slowing down lvl2/3 verifications to benefit from these extra withdrawal fees doesn't make sense to me, as they know this would lead to a backlash and resentment thus loss of customers which would probably be more damaging to their business than earning a quick buck in this way?
I agree, it should be cheap to hire people for verification, perhaps as I suggested above, the verfications are ending up at the back of the queue because they want their support working on deposit/withdrawal issues? For such staff employment, I would expect a lot more training / trust /screening required. They should have separate support teams if they don't already?
The problem that polo don't seem to understand is when you have been waiting so long for verification, you start to doubt their trustworthiness, and worry that those dollars on your screen account will "disappear". This is the main reason for this thread, I have a fairly large balance and the fact they have finally verified my level 2 withdrawals suggests all is fine at poloniex towers (i.e, no hacks). I am now 50% out, but will admit, my worry will only end once I am 100% out regardless of all my rational reasoning.
Ultimately, had I known 2 months ago that the waiting time for level 2 verification was going to take so long I would no way have deposited the amount of bitcoin there as I did! Risk/Reward wouldn't have been worth it.
cryptosifu, out of interest, what extra hoops do you have to jump through for level 3?