Bitcoin Forum

I wanted to see what you guys think or what to do?

I'm helping out a new user who just got into bitcoin. He was at an ATM and talked to the owner and said it was a 1% fee to Sell bitcoins. The machine itself didn't have any fee information. Anyhow, when he went to proceed it charged him 20% fee or a little over couple hundred dollar fee when selling 1k of btc. Afterwards, he called the number for support but all they do is hang up even after they just talked.

He's now asking what he can do and if that is even legal? But I am still skeptical as it could have been user error. Normally doesn't it say the fee even on the screen prior to confirming a sell or purchase? However, he says there was no fee warning stickers on the machine and there was no fee % warning while on screen. Any help appreciated.

A good way to avoid this would be to have sold ~10% first to test the system/fees.

"Is it even legal"
No, it sounds criminal, but...
In theory, if he had a witness and/or video of the owner claiming 1%, then he could win in civil court and also try to press criminal charges.
In reality, civil court costs are too high, and the district attorney is too busy for a criminal case.

True, wish there was a recording of the conversation.

Would there be be anything to do since it did not have any fee warnings? Is there some kind of regulation or enforcement that requires ATM's to show what fee they are charging before accepting a deposit or withdrawal? Thanks for the answer.

No, it is a complicated issue. For you to take any action outside of
sending the owner complaints, would be a waste of time. There are no real
regulations or rules that govern BTMs. Your argument will be mostly hearsay.

Can you tell us where the BTM was located?
What type of device was it?
Is the BTM a buy & sell device?

Sometimes people register their BTMs on sites that provide notice of the fees.
https://coinatmradar.com/ (https://coinatmradar.com/)

Depending on what country you live in and what information you have, you might be able to open up a fraud court case and challenge the owner in court. But for $1k, as other users have said, it might be too expensive to go to court over it.

bad action from ATM owner,he should know that bitcoin ATM not put any fee on label,this is should clarified,what the vendor of that ATM? maybe we can aks directly to the company and make this solved.

just wondering.. was he from canada, but was comparing how much canadian dollar he got to the american USD price.. as there is about a 20% difference between USD and CAD

also ATM fee's are meaningless..

i can easily show a price that has 0% fee (using one exchange as a comparison) and also 2% fee (using a different exchange) and the values would be better using the one with the fee's
EG
BTC-e: $439 +2% fee = $447.78
bitstamp: $449 + 0% = $449.00

$1.22 better infact

but i think at a 20% markup. the chances are the person is canadian. but if he is american using an american ATM then thats a bit of a rip off.

just be sure to look at the values before accepting the offer

Name and shame. Scream it all over Reddit too. Even if the guy misheard, 20% is a fuckin joke and people need to warned off it.

Hey guys, thanks for all the answers. I really appreciate the quick and detailed responses.

I don't want to name or provide the location just yet as I do not want to give them a bad reputation yet if there is a misunderstanding. I sent an email to the operator to get some answers myself and hear their side of the story. Hopefully they respond.

It is a BTM with buy/sell functionality and it is a BitAccess ATM.

I'm still investigating but another possibility is the user I was helping with may have spoke to the Store Owner instead of the Bitcoin ATM owner. In this case, it's not the responsibility of the Store Owner if he did not know and just said 1% when he did not call the actual ATM owner/operator. Another thing is, I am skeptical about the fee not being shown. From my experience generally the fees are shown on screen. But again, it is also possible maybe its a bugged ATM or some kind of technical issue that didn't show the fee % for whatever reason.

Anyways still investigating. If it turns out just being foul play then I will post the location to warn others from having that happen to them. But if it's a user error who just did not happen to see the screen or went through it too fast, then I will drop this issue.

Thanks again.

This ATM and user is located in the USA. So it wouldn't be that. It was a flat out 20% fee for the amount he withdraw.

Think this is just the conversion to American,I recall being a little pissed the first time I bought bitcoin from atm. Bitaccess are usually pretty good when I have contacted them for details in the past. Believe they even will meet you in person if you want to exchange larger amounts.

I second this.  You said it was in the US, and now I'm really curious.  I have yet to meet anyone who's seriously into bitcoin and I've definitely never seen a bitcoin ATM.

In that case you should visit the said atm and to a small transaction to see if it displays a fee on screen or not.You can also verify other details given by that guy if you visit the atm where that happened

Hey, I'm running coinatmradar.com bitcoin ATM map (https://coinatmradar.com/).

Can you find this machine on the map and check what the fees are listed now? I think for many BitAccess machines the fees are available

If you don't want to share the machine publicly - send me a pm, I will try to help you and contact operator as well to find out details and try to solve it for you.

I think in your case it was a very simple situation, when owner of the location didn't have the latest updated info, also operator can change fees remotely at any time, so it could be 1% one day and then it could be changed.
However, I think 20% is something strange for the sell bitcoin fee, usually it is lower than buy fee (average sell fee is at 5% now, you can check it on stats page on my site). Maybe in this particular case the operator was low on cash and that's why raised the rate.

Also BitAccess machine UI has sell price displayed during the process - you can see it here in the right upper corner during sell process: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoaviCX4Urw, so I think whoever used the machine was not careful enough to look for details of operation.

OP, sleaze and chicanery are intrinsic to Bitcoin. Better your friend learns this early on.

Fees should definatly be posted in plain sight.

...

In my city, the few BTMs have a fee ranging from 9% to 14%-plus.  The fees were lower until recently.  It may be that when you add up all the costs (the machine itself, managing it (putting BTC in, taking cash out, electricity, rent, etc.), a very low fee would not sustain such a business.

To my knowledge the machine I have used DOES NOT show the fee either.

20% is very high.  Even the normal 14% I see drove me to using Circle when I want to buy.

The one time I checked out an ATM in my city, the price was 15% higher than the market price. I didn't bother with it, as there are much cheaper options.

it's maybe why the dude stole the atm and fired in a store last year.

i never hear that news,is that really happen?
the owner put fee for his own,and maybe for closing maintance cost of that ATM,but that percentage was too high,imagine if each day people use that ATM 100 times,the owner should really make big profit.

How is that possible. Well anyway, that’s too much costly. But from the OP's post, it might be a lie. But if it’s true, the owner have made lots of money by charging such an amount.

Sure.

Well, if it’s that way, maybe I should go get my own ATM. How can the fee be up to 20%, that’s too much. Lastly I checked it was 10% fee. I don’t really understand that.

Thanks for confirming another machine DOES NOT show the fee. I keep meaning to try a BTM, and this thread has given the good advice to do a small test transaction first so you don't get scammed by unstated high fees. Do you have to wait for a long time for your transaction to go through? If you do it could put people off doing a test transaction.

20% is a complete p*sstake. I've never found myself having to use an ATM for bitcoin but with fees like this, with no warning or notice, I'm not going anywhere near one. But you should have definitely done a smaller test transaction first. When it comes to btc it pays to be sceptical.

It would be nice if there was more uniformity in how they operate. I know that's uncool in its own way but it's often the first point of contact for people and it does no good to leave a sour taste.

You raise a good point about doing a small test transaction to see how it goes.  I have used two BTC machines, both worked about the same (they scanned QR code off mobile device to send the BTC).  Transactions went just like any other BTC transaction, confirmation in (very) roughly 10 minutes or so.

Even if the BTMs charge a high amount, a small transaction would not be painful.

Also, if the BTM is your only handy alternative, then you may not have a choice, until recently the BTMs were my "best" option for a year or two.

If there are no stickers on the Bitcoin ATM warning you of the high fees and there are no on-screen prompts either I think this is borderline criminal activity and you are in your right to seek your lost money back in fees. You could videotape another smaller transaction just to display the misleading process and then show the footage to the local police or a news station or something. The ATM operator will land in hot water in no time because this is outright scamming.

Whoever this is, has to be trashed in public... they are ruining adoption by doing this. Your friend will tell everyone about this and he might think this is the norm. F#$% them and the horse they rode

into town with. We are trying to tell people that Bitcoin is cheap and these scamming MF's are killing off all our attempts at doing this. The Remittance services has been doing this for years and they

got away with that, because they had a monopoly. I would contact the competition and tell them about this and ask them to install a BTM with a lower fee close to that machine and kill off all it's

business in the area. We do not need bad operators like this.... get rid of them.

The problem with Bitcoin related ATM's is that they are very centralized at this point as just a few companies/entities own nearly all of them. I do understand that they have to make profit, but the high fees and the combination with you having to verify yourself in some cases are a good reason for me to not use them.

If there are plenty of different companies with these ATM's around the world you will see them battle against each other with lowering their fees to attract people. But at this point they are too expensive to use.

yup, true story.

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=b46_1446731881

It might not show the fee, but it always shows you the price of bitcoin you purchase at. I don't know a single machine, which doesn't do this.
Which type of machine are you talking about?

20% transactions fee even it's legal but for me it was like robbery because i didn't use bitcoin ATM and only convert my bitcoin into my local currency but the fee is not so big and i think ATM companies doesn't dishonest about informations of fee and better stay away from those bitcoin ATM

Some think 3% credit card fees are robbery ::)

I wonder if it is foreign exchange fees. The dollar has been rising in the last year against every currency on the planet. So if the BTC in the ATM was priced in dollars, and your friend used a local currency to pay, they would have had to change the local currency to dollars, incurred an exchange fee on top of that, and then incurred the 1% fee the ATM charged.

I don't know why people use ATMs, just use an exchange. Yes you have to give your name to the exchange, but that's no different to giving your name to Amazon when you buy something from them.

OP, please give us more details. Your thread title accuses the owner of the bitcoin atm of lying about the fee and you say he subsequently hangs up on you when you tried to call him. If this is true then fuck that guy.

Give us the location, city, state, store, owner name, bitcointalk.org username, phone number, anything, everything. And let him know you did so. Otherwise this kind of shady shit will continue to happen to others and possibly turn off new bitcoiners. There are two btc atm's in my city (Dallas,Tx) and I would like to know for future reference. Thanks.