Bitcoin Forum

I placed an order with coinabul on 4/20/2013 for 4 silver eagles.  They charged .15 BTC per coin, which was paid immediately by myself.  It's been 10 days and I received the following email from them saying "Sorry, we had a server crash.  We couldn't cash out in time, so we'll send you 3 silver eagles instead of 4, is that cool?" 

My answer to them is a resounding NO, it is not cool.  They charged me in BTC. I paid in BTC. They should honor their deal, case closed.  If you bet on a football game, and you lose, you do not get to modify the bet after the game is over.

So, I send this out to everyone as a warning, do business with coinabul at your own risk.  If the market moves in a way that does not benefit them, they will try to renegotiate the deal after you've already paid.

Can you imagine if amazon tried something like this?


The email to me from Jay at Coinabul, a week after the transaction (and my payment):
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On April 10th-11th we were hit with a 'perfect storm' situation which caused us to have a major issue with transaction processing.

Due to a previously undiscovered bug in Bitcoin 0.8.1 we experienced an issue where bitcoind corrupted our hotwallet, along with our blockchain, but did so in such a way that for a few hours it was still rendering payment addresses to customers but unable to sync to the network, or even see unconfirmed transactions coming in. This is the kind of one-in-a-million occurance that happens when using cutting edge systems like Bitcoin, and we're glad it happened to us instead of a normal user who would have likely been unable to salvage any bitcoins from the mess. We immediately shut down our daemon and proceeded to begin repairing and salvaging, as well as deploying a hot-patch to enable us to extract the remaining BTC from the wallet in question.

In the short time it took us to salvage our hotwallet, bitcoin price plummetted at minor exchanges as most of the major ones suddenly went offline. At that point, we'd already initiated a few major transfers to exchanges which weren't even able to show up in our balances for another day or so, let alone be sold at anything even resembling the spot price you spent them for. At that point we were left with the crucial decision of whether to sell any remaining coins at a much lower rate than expected, and do our best to lock in a higher spot price before the market crashed further, or hold on to your coins and return them to you. We opted to do the former which is a good thing, considering bitcoin price proceeded to hit less than half of the value at which we sold.

Now we are left with two choices on how to resolve the situation that affected your purchase: 1. I can send you the metal value your coins were eventually able to net(3 ounces); 2. I can return the dollar-value of your coins by repurchasing that dollar-value's worth of BTC and send it to you.

Let me know which is preferred, and I'll do that.

Thanks, and I appreciate your understanding in this issue.
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What is Coinabul, what do they do?

They are a site where you can buy gold and silver bullion for bitcoins.  Their site is pretty polished and it looked promising. 

After reading the message boards, it looks like they had a key guy leave in March and things have just never been right with them since. 

Oh well, lesson learned. Before spending bitcoins at any site, check the message boards first to see if they are legit.

CoinCrunch

I'm beggining to think all bitcoin transaction for real goods and some services should be done through an escrow service. Its way to easy to get ripped off otherwise.

I have not had this email and I placed a order with them on the 9/4/13.  And I have had 1 reply to my email's asking when I will be getting my goods. to which i have had a reply asking me to check my order status on the website. which has not changed..

Starting to wonder if I will ever get my BTC back or my silver bars :(

Not looking good tho.

Checkout amagimetals.

Good advice! :)

What a bunch of scammers.  When the BTC price goes up and they don't deliver, they only refund in USD.

When the price goes down, they reduce your purchase.

Basically they're betting on the BTC direction with your money, and taking the profit and giving you what's left.

Don't deal with these jokers.

You say that but when u search for the they have lots of good feedback on this very forum. seems like only recently things have went ''tits up'' as we say.

If i get a refund ill be happy, If i get my product ill be over the moon, If i get nothing... Then when I am over in America next month i will be paying them a Personal visit.

Which i am sure they do not want.

:)

.

Bitcoin went up quite a bit after I placed my order with Coinabul, I wonder if they will send me some extra silver.

Why the fuck hasnt coinabul gotten a scammer tag yet? What is this, the 5th or 6th complaint on a matter of months?

Exactly!

Price goes down, they reduce your order.  If BTC doubled in price before they shipped, do you think they would EVER email and say "Hey, we made far too much from this, we're going to send you some extra bullion"?  Never going to happen.

Scam tag long overdue.

That being said, does anyone know of a *reputable* bullion dealer that sells for bitcoins?

Madness!

Same., WHY when you search on here do you find a large thread saying they are ok and many happy customers, now I have lost my BTC and looks like i won't be getting my 4 silver bars.. They have not answered the phone in over a week, no reply to my messages on here. via email and via the contact form on the site..

Would admin please put a warning up about coinabul...

This is outrageous behavior from a some what reputable company..

and has anyone else noticed all the phone number route to a Google number.. which is always going onto voicemail??

COINABUL  EXPLAIN YOURSELF PLEASE!!

Look at Amagi Metals. They are also running slow from greatly increased volume, but they are very upfront about it and communicative.

I Just received my shipping info for my order.  I will report if the goods arrive or not in good time

I'd say scammers in these circumstances in which no legal authority can punish should be punished by us the people of the Internet and the bitcoin society... The base, which is this forum, is already set for us to name, shame, and even take action against such acts.

Correct me if I'm wrong

Try amagimetals.com or my own company https://bitfunder.com/asset/TU.SILVER -- we order exclusively from Amagi Metals -- the benefit from ordering from us is that we ship immediately, Amagi metals sometimes has to mint the coins or order them before they can ship to you and it can take a very long time.

For example they cannot ship Canadian Maples right now (they're delayed) but I can get you Canadian Maples in 7 days anywhere in the world. We just got them in from Amagi ^^ Plus, we're not involved in the order process on BitFunder, and we only deal in BTC, so you will never get any kind of "story" about how the exchange rate isn't working out or something went wrong with the website :p

Same thing happened to me...  I posted my horror story too.  Code Bug and Bitcoin crash...time for the customer to pay.

I'm out 11 BTC and No response from them.

And reading their ToS, it looks like we're all $#% out of luck too...  Although the fact they had a DB error it's kinda their fault...unless they are blaming bitcoin then they are not responsible for that either according to their ToS.

What really gets me is that gold price has dropped too...so if I try to cash out the gold option they make money there too.

" If an order cannot be filled by Coinabul we will either: provide a substitute product of your choice of equivalent value, or provide a refund, minus any market loss incurred and at our discretion."

Doh!

Time to try to Satoshidice some of the BTC back!  /sarcasm

It is absolutely their fault!  They built a crappy infrastructure, their database got corrupted, and when they finally got back on their feet, the market crashed. 

Clearly, according to their TOS, the customers must be punished for that.

Scammer Tag please.

According to their Terms of Service:

That's pretty bad. If they are going to lose money on a sale, they just refund you, but keep the amount of money they would have lost. Basically, it means they can steal your money.

I've placed an order with them, and it's still showing as "pending"
it's been a while, no responses

I think whoever got scammed (I'm counting maybe 6+ in the past week alone) should all get organized.  This could get ugly.  I sent another email to them again last night.  No response.  What do we do in this scenario?  With bitcoin, we can't just get it back.  State Attorney General's office complaint? FTC?  Business is supposedly incorporated in Wyoming, phone number is in Florida.  This guy could be in China for all I know. 

That's some bullshit right there. I had a relatively smooth transaction with Coinabul but I'm never dealing with them again with that in the TOS.

Does a TOS have any legal ground? I think you can write whatever you want there, but when you purchase something you either get the product or you get a full refund. If you would sue them, you would win...

It has nothing to do with this thread but:

If you bet on a football game it happens once in a while that they modify or cancel the bet afterwards because THEY set the wrong odds on it.
Or they invalidate it because your bet was too large, or if you had bets that was "on both sides" ... etc etc.

Read the betting sites TOS sometimes and you will be scared...

They also give themself the right to arbitrarily close the accounts of "unprofitable" customers. (not everyone does but many do).

I have had 5 accounts closed so far: (sportingbet, bwin, stanjames, eurobet and 1 more i do not remember the name of).

The reason was that was not profitable or that i was betting to much on "wongly set odds".