Bitcoin Forum

I have sent my $500.00 to them more than two weeks back. I haven't heard a single word on what happened to my money yet. The interesting part is, I did not even ask them for for a bit coin deposit. But rather a vouchX deposit...not sure why they cant event get the coupons over to me after 2 weeks unless they just "swallowed" my money.

I heard good things about them thats why I decided to use them for the transfer, but think I made a big mistake. I have posted more than 5 times over the past week and not even a single useful response. Their support guys are trying their best to be responsive on their thread but I dont think theres being any useful progress being made at all(atleast from my experience).

I at least want this post to be a warning for others to be more careful...as bitinstant dont even seem to have a notice about these delays on their site(why should they? More money coming in the better for them I guess!)

I am sure they are scammers. Look in the Service Discussion, many users have deposits that vanish, of much larger amounts. This has been going on for a month now. Anyone using BitInstant now, will risk putting money in a sink hole.

You may look at this poll,
http://bitinstantscam.com

And this
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=171473.0

Here is more,
http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1bzo49/do_not_use_bitinstant/

I placed an order with BitInstant during a big dip a couple weeks ago and didn't receive my btc until four days later. They didn't even send me the right amount! I believe their policy is to lock in a price once dwolla funds are received, which means I should have received ~20% more BTC! Their support was very unhelpful and didn't seem to think my issue was important enough to resolve.

Knock on wood I have used them 2x so far in the past 4 weeks and haven't had any issues.

My transactions were cash>MtGox and cash>email address.

pretty sure they gambled with the users money while the price was raising and made a nice amount of money through that... yet now that the bubble did burst they face the problem that their coin is only worth half of what it should be.. so they have to take orders to pay older orders..

I dont have proof but this is the only reason i can think of why all of a sudden they have liquidity problems and deny people (like me) the money they should have got a week ago...

If someone has a better reason for this i'd be happy to hear it..

Yes. For longer than a month. I have been warning peole since Jan. The scammed me back in November, then led me along (technical issues, someone deathly ill, etcetc, for abut two months, then pretty much not giving you your money. Stop using them before you become the next victim.

I was also scammed. Been a week of relentlessly trying to get my money and they won't give me it.  This thread deserves attention

same here...

waiting since 5 days... - no reactions from them more then 48 hours ... - and before  telling always the same ("they are already looking into it", "someone is just now working on it" a.s.o. - and nothing ever happened ...)

been waiting 9 days for a simple mtgox to bitstamp usd transfer.  i have not received even an acknowledgement of my issue from bitinstant.  see my sig for details.

I am missing out on the time to buy because I used to use bitinstant, they need to clean up or else this won't look good for bitcoin in general.

Ya its almost as though they think they cant be held accountable or something. Not sure whats the best way to hold them accountable....I mean I do have receipt confirmation and everything...

Why are the mods ignoring this?  Is Bitinstant "too big to fail"?

honestly the moderation on here is disgusting and apparently they back every big scammer that rolls through even up to the end.

forums are not the way to contact bitstamp...

internet people are really fail sometimes...

just for the report: got my money today, problem solved.

For everyone who's posted on this thread and has either an order that didn't arrive or which arrived delayed please post your OrderID and i'll personally handle it.

I've already handled the OP's order.

Yes, I just got my money. I can confirm. Thx for handling our cases.

Today I have waited 32 days for a bitinstant transfer.

My first complaint to bitinstant was made 31 days ago, which ultimately ended with support telling me "Direct your questions to Charlie, he is the only one that can help you now. Best of luck!", that was 25 days ago.

Charlie did not respond for another 8 days, and countless emails, from me and the exchanges' support people. Charlie then stated it should be fixed shortly, in less than an hour. It was not fixed.

Another 8 days later, I contacted them via the new channel and got the auto-reply that, "Please rest assured, ---, I should expect the funds within 12 hours ..."

Since then I have heard nothing. No transfer completed.

I have yet to hear any sensible statement from bitinstant explaining their complete incompetence in fulfilling their promise, and as they are still accepting new unsuspecting customers, I find no other explanation than to believe they are fully fledged scammers.

Update: I got the transfer completed after 36 days.  So I assume they do not really try to be criminals.  But, I would not use the service again for obvious reasons.

It's a ponzi scheme.  Simple as that.  It likely didn't start out that way, since it used to be instant, but it certainly is now.  When enough new orders come in, your order will be funded out of those, and those people will have to wait for more orders to come in.  They have thus far done an amazing job of silencing most of the public complaints by having Ursay just reply to every complaint in the thread saying that he has "pushed" their order for the 20th time.  That way Bitinstant appears to be responsive even though they are still way behind with no end to this problem in sight.  I guess if they keep talking, regardless of whether or not they actually deliver orders, no one will go to the authorities.  It's working so far anyway.  The site is still active and promising "instant" bitcoin transactions.

From https://www.bitinstant.com/faq :

"Funds can be available in as little as 15 minutes and are typically available within one hour at the exchange or other merchant selected by the Customer. All payments are processed automatically."  

I wonder when the last time was that one hour was "typical" of a Bitinstant transaction.  Additionally, there are 320+ pages in their support thread showing that payments are far from automatic.  In just those two sentences, there are two fraudulent statements designed to induce people into sending them money under false pretenses.  In legal parlance Bitinstant has deployed a "scheme or artifice to defraud" in violation of 18 USC Section 1343 (Fraud by Wire, Radio, or Television).

Please do not make accusations like this without evidence, as it happens the last order to execute under an hour took about 1 minute and executed just now (I checked just as I was posting this).

What can happen is we get delays which can temporarily slow down processing or cause problems, which is why we have expanded our deadlines to 24 hours.

There is plenty of evidence in your support thread.


Looking at the last 2 months, would you honestly argue that a 1 minute delivery time frame, or even the one hour time frame specified in your FAQ, is a "typical" time frame?



Are you honestly saying that even 24 hours is "typical" of transactions at Bitinstant these days?  Even if it is, the "typically available within 1 hour" statement is still in your FAQ as of 1:34pm Pacific time on 4/25/13.  That is a fraudulent statement, even according to what you have said here.

I wish BitInstant worked as promised, it would make my business much easier.  Unfortunately, in my experience and that of many of my customers, it doesn't.

There's "evidence" of delayed orders which our support team are constantly working on and resolving every day.

No, I wouldn't - we've had a rough period where a lot of orders were delayed causing a backlog, especially within the past 2 months or so - but this is improving and I remind you that people whose orders execute fine don't post complaining about it.
Unfortunately I can't give you the details of individual orders without customer consent, so instead we will be releasing statistical data fairly soon to demonstrate what kind of timeframes people actually get.

Typical timeframes are somewhere between 1 minute to 4 hours for most orders recently, that's updated from our old 1 hour timeframe (our current hard deadlines - beyond which customers are entitled to a refund, are set to 24 hours).


Again, people don't post complaints when the service works fine - most of the orders I can grab from our list of today's orders actually executed in about a minute.

This is a valid point actually. If you used a single address model people could trivially verify about how much BTC you're pumping out and that'd perhaps serve as a quiet bolster for your position.

Actually, for me it was the only way to contact them  ;D Sending an e-mail for support was pointless. Once I got on here and sent a PM to someone in charge my problem was cleared up within a day.

I agree their communication is atrocious, but since I've had many (10+) successful less-than-1-minute transfers with them, and my one problem transfer was eventually cleared up once I contacted the right person the right way, I don't think they are intentionally trying to rip people off.

Would you have said anything if it were longer?  It's a pretty meaningless statistic, like saying "The last Bitcoin transaction on the network took 5 minutes to confirm, therefore the average transaction takes that long."  Is this counting orders your system marks as "filled" after 2 minutes and then emails the customer an error in the APIResponse field, leaving them to contact you to actually get the order filled?  (I have one such instance several months ago, admittedly it may not be very common.)

Median execution time at start of april (sampling data from first of april to the 5th of april) was 81.89 seconds, mean was 1743.84 seconds, quickest was under a second, longest was 12 days

We'll be releasing more formal stats sometime over the next month with much more detail.

Forgot to respond to the APIResponse issue - I don't have formal stats on that one yet, but it roughly happens in 1 out of every 10 failed orders (in other words, for every 10 orders that a customer contacts support about, about 1 in 10 of those has a dodgy APIResponse field).

The stats I posted just above simply count the time between "New Order" and "Order executed" events.

i appreciate the transparency.  It should be noted that this is a 5-day period at the later end of your own admitted "rough period where a lot of orders were delayed causing a backlog, especially within the past 2 months or so."  Since it's toward the end when you say things are getting better, it may not be a fair representative sample.  I wouldn't be surprised if your entire ~2 year history has a better record, but it probably also has a lot smaller average volume than you've had in the last 2 months.  Also, with a mean of 1743.84 seconds / 60 = 29 hours, it looks like your average order over this period took longer than your 24-hour maximum deadline.  I'm frankly not all that familiar with statistics or even the legal definitions of statistical service guarantees, but from my understanding of your numbers, saying "Funds... are typically available within one hour at the exchange" (https://www.bitinstant.com/faq) sounds like a bit of a stretch if not completely false, at least during this sample period. (Edit: wrong, the mean is 29 minutes.)


Well, I guess I'm glad it's a low-ish percentage, but I hope no orders with dodgy APIResponse fields are being automatically closed anymore.  My order was marked as executed but I hadn't received the funds, and was emailed an APIResponse error code.

1743.84 seconds is not 29 hours!
There are 3600 seconds in an hour:
1743.84/3600.0 = 0.4844

Just under half an hour, or 29.064 minutes (minutes, not hours)

Oops, how embarrassing.  I will strike that out.  My apologies for being misleading, it was an honest mistake.

Edit: At the risk of sounding like a sore loser when I've been made a fool of on my basic time math:  I would still wonder if a bigger/earlier sample would be worse, and if the "Order executed" event timestamp is always correct.  If I'm understanding your 1/10 APIResponse support-case estimate, and am correct in assuming that these orders had an "Order executed" event logged before support was contacted, and that the "Order executed" event timestamp was not corrected or re-set to the actual completion time... then the average could be higher.  Feel free to correct me if any of those assumptions are incorrect.  My own order from January, which falls into this category, still reports an incorrect "Order executed" timestamp on the status page, off by the several days it took Support to manually clear the order.

Looking forward to regular public statistics, for everyone's good.

Edit 2: Upon looking at this thread's history more, I regret feeding this thread as a lot of it is baseless accusations and my own stupid incorrect math.  However I believe my points above to have merit, and look forward to seeing them addressed by either more information, a change on BitInstant's part, or correction on any other mistakes I have made. :)

You are absolutely right that the forum complaints could only represent a minuscule fraction of your gross transaction volume.  I hope that is the case.  I'm just curious, if it wasn't a financial problem, why for at least most of March, you were letting your reputation sink precipitously by not resolving transactions that had issues if it represented such an inconsequential portion of your transactions?  Also, any technical issues could have been easily sorted in this time frame.  I'm not saying you're lying, I'm just saying that none of it makes sense.

Whatever the reasons for the issues, it does appear that Bitinstant is marginally more healthy than it was 2 months ago.  Hopefully you can fully recover from whatever has happened.

I can answer this. The reason is that nobody (except BitInstant, of course) pays attention to these "BitInstant is a scam" threads. People that have been around a while are reasonably certain that the newbies that post these threads are wrong.

They probably aren't wrong.  There is alot of smoke, and generally where there is smoke there's fire.  Something bad happened over there, and they are probably recovering to some degree because of transaction fees over the last few months.  I don't care what happens, unless something has gone seriously off the rails, you don't operate a business where trust is your primary asset and effectively refuse to address the problems of customers that are publicly complaining of money missing for more than a month.

I like the kid, he's got mettle.

In BitInstant's defense, I personally bought Bitcoins sent directly to my wallet a couple days ago, and then some again today. I live right across from a payment center, and by time I got home (3-5mins), it was already in my wallet. So perhaps their growing pains are over.

Thank you for the service BitInstant!

clint25n