Bitcoin Forum

Hello all,

Made an account so I could raise this concern regarding changelly.com. Will try follow your format for scam postings below...

What happened:

On June 3rd 2017, I exchanged 0.68902858 ZEC for BTC using changelly.com... A few minutes after the exchange was completed I realized that changelly took approx. 80% of my funds in fees which is absurd! I ended up receiving 0.01128376 BTC but LOST 0.05037138 BTC in fees!

Over the last 4 days I have opened several support tickets, all of which have been ignored and even used an old twitter account to direct message them to which I received a casual response of...

"Hi! Thanks for waiting. Unfortunately, the bitcoin blockchain is overloaded. That's why it takes rather high network fees."

Again, that's a completely absurd response as 0.0005 BTC in fees might be considered reasonable but 0.05 BTC in fees is utter madness!!

Scammers Profile Link:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=823207

Reference Link:

https://changelly.com

Amount Scammed:

0.05037138 BTC

Payment Method:

ZEC (Zcash)

Proof of Payment:

My ZEC wallet to Changelly...

https://explorer.zcha.in/transactions/fff2024ad56abc65a1fbad53c0e076194cb4246981d431b7be6aa653d5a8dd54

Changelly to my BTC wallet...

https://blockchain.info/tx/31642957e7045a7d5e37e4a4b085d58f6532e86a67352165a9100b4badb2ab10

Changelly Transaction # a63f90111c4e

https://ibb.co/jPAECa

PM/Chat Logs:

https://ibb.co/gM7GQv

Additional Notes:

It is my hope that Changelly will do the right thing and refund me but it's not looking likely at this point so I figured I'd make this post to warn others and possibly motivate Changelly to process a refund for me.

FYI, After this incident I now see that Changelly doesn't even have decent contact info on their "about" page, no address, no phone number, pretty sketchy for sure so I advise caution to other users looking for an cryptocurrency exchange, I recommend avoiding Changelly.com!!!

https://changelly.com/about

Thank you!

Bastards!!

Thanks for sharing DjArmani. 

Down with changelly.com !!!

Sorry you had to take hit for us all to learn changelly.com are cheats.

Your a good man and I like your style ;)

Spread the word people and let's get DjArmani his coins back.

Jeez I was actually considering using them....

Very unprofessional, they paid to you from many inputs without merging them into one. This looks so shady to me, that i will have to leave some feedback to them. Avoid this crap service. Something like 0.001 BTC would be reasonable, and their high amount of inputs is not your responsibility at all.

Wow, that is just shocking. No matter what, you as a company (Changelly) have literally scammed this customer with that astronomically high fee conversion. This is highly unprofessional and I would urge you to resolve this issue. So after checking that bit further, you think paying a customer from a shitload of addresses filled with dust is okay, with the customer swallowing that fee? Now that is dick move if I ever saw one. You should consolidate these dust addresses without making the customer pay for it. Quit disgusted really.

---

OP, sorry to hear about this. I have tagged the account in question, and we can only hope they refund the majority of that BTC. Time will tell.

So shocked about the transaction ID, That's too many outputs that's why the transaction fee blows up, that's not what legit company works out. BTW thanks for sharing this OP, and sorry for your lose. People now must learn about this shitty site.

Thank you all for your replies indicating your support. Still no refund from changelly.com... they are not professional, ignoring my tickets completely. Hopefully this thread motivates them to resolve this. At the very least, let my loss be your gain, I do not recommend changelly.com and want to warn others about this shady site.

If any of you have recommendations of trustworthy exchanges other than shapeshift, please let me know. I will of course update this thread with the outcome of the situation. They cheated me out of about $190 CAD and I don't want others to take any losses to these guys!

It seems more likely that you have a virus or something that changes the wallet address. The *exact* wallet address you quote shows up in a web page for Alameda County Foreclosure listings!!

https://www.propertyshark.com/mason/CA/Alameda-County/Trustees-Sales

Perhaps a malware is fetching a rotating address from there or something along those lines.

Their blog post about tx fees says that they will charge 0.0002 btc in tx fees. I don't see any reason why they would charge more than that. The user has no control over what inputs they use/have. They should charge fees in a way to account for the fact that they will sometimes need to consolidate many inputs as they did in your transaction.

Agreed. This is ridiculous no matter how overloaded the bitcoin network is. I can get around 25-30 inputs in there and pay a 0.03 BTC or less fee and get a confirmation within the first block. Why are they charging OP 0.05 BTC for something that he has no control over? Why are they using so many inputs in the first place when they know that the blockchain is full? They're paying nearly 400 sats/byte which is unreasonable as well.


OP received the transaction, the problem is that apparently Changelly charged him 0.05 BTC in miners fees, when they were supposed to only charge him 0.00002 BTC. I've used changelly in a couple of occassions, i've never had any problems with them but i won't use them again until this is cleared up.

UPDATE: June 10th 2017

After almost a week of waiting, I finally managed to get a refund from Changelly.com! They NEVER responded to any of my support tickets and came across rather hesitant to cough up the funds in our Twitter direct message exchange. The issue was theirs and not any fault of my own so I remained insistent that they owed me a refund. Finally they did cough up some funds...

Twitter direct message screenshot of them finally agreeing to a refund...

https://ibb.co/dTVoOF

Refund Transaction of 0.04854986 BTC ... (Not 0.05 BTC as I requested to be technical..lol)

https://blockchain.info/tx/0fe5f6f8a6a814c3ba3da94a90cd498c7b4000df6333b01d40993611ed4407b2

Overall, I don't find changelly.com very professional at all with their support. It is unlikely that I will use them again as it took a lot of effort to get this matter resolved. I recommend caution to other users looking for a cryptocurrency exchange. I DO NOT RECOMMEND CHANGELLY.COM! They clearly have some work to do with their system if they want to compete with the big exchanges!

Thank you all for your support and kind words :)

Glad that you got your money back, but they are so unprofessional that my negative feedback stays on them. I used them once, and they took 3 freaking hours to exchange, also they basically do not care about the customer.

Funny you should say that as I've only used them once before and I had to wait over an hour for my previous exchange also. I have followed your lead sir and have also left them negative feedback on their bitcointalk profile! Perhaps it will motivate them to improve their support and services in time ;)

In this case,  Changelly should
at least compensate you for the trouble it may have caused.

@OP - Glad to hear that you received your refund, really :)

I don't quite know what to do about the rating I have left them though. I will likely revise it to a neutral after discussing the situation with a fellow DT member.

Apart from all of that, I recommend that people avoid using their service and stick with Shapeshift.

Thank you sir, Changelly did cough up the funds in the end :)

From now on I will likely use Bittrex or Shapeshift. While I've had issues with Shapeshift in the past, I can say that their support is good and they always resolve the problem within 48 hours along with giving relatively prompt response to support tickets ;)

Dear Customers, unfortunately we've missed that thread, but need to clarify.

Issue was solved in a few days after the incident, compensation has been sent, that was confirmed by the topic starter. Recently we've implemented bitcoin output transactions merging to reduce the fees and speedup confirmations in blockchain.

As for support, we were heavily overloaded in May as many other popular services due to market was booming. Since that time our support team has been doubled to help you quicker.

If we are experiencing any delays, we always notify our customers about that before payment. In June we've integrated a few more exchange partners to prevent delays, even when Poloniex stuck.

Hope you will be satisfied by our service further!

I used your service on June 3rd 2017...

https://explorer.zcha.in/transactions/fff2024ad56abc65a1fbad53c0e076194cb4246981d431b7be6aa653d5a8dd54

You did not refund me until June 9th 2017, that makes it almost a week, 6 days to be technical...

https://live.blockcypher.com/btc/tx/0fe5f6f8a6a814c3ba3da94a90cd498c7b4000df6333b01d40993611ed4407b2/

So many accusations against changely I think they are recommended partners of minergate I saw that they are recommending this exchange to their miners I think they have the same owner, I hope many bloggers will write about changely's scamming activity

Yeah, which is a shame because minergate is a decent mining pool. They were formerly owned by minergate, but became a seperate company (as far as i know). I think that there should be even a pinned warning of this service because of so many complaints about their service.

In future you can exchange your coins with bittrex and poloniex, these exchanges might be a bid difficult to understand if you are new and never used an exchange like them with graphs and all, but the fact is that it ain't something hard to trade there + most likely you will get the better rate. I know that by trading with changelly they will give you less even with buying with credit card there are places that are cheaper.

They actually haven't scammed you with fees, but they have a bad algorithm that give the wrong idea about the fees, which sucks for this kind of service it would be okay I suppose if they say "Please note that the fee would be 0.xxxxx btc , do you agree?" because this is so unprofessional by them.

Both Poloniex and Bittrex have withdrawal limits, long KYC process and payment verification, it can take weeks. Changelly almost has no amount restrictions for exchange. For the big crypto-crypto trades we usually provide better rates, even if you exchange manually on Poloniex. As we have a pretty small trading fees on our verified corporate accounts on Polo and Bittrex, our exchange partners. We split the deal to a few smaller orders and trade right near the spread to give you the best available rate on the market.

As for the withdrawal fees, recently we've implemented merging bitcoins transaction to reduce the fees and provide super fast blockchain confirmation. The same as Poloniex does.

No amount restriction but at what cost? Can anyone realistically use your service for a large scale conversion? The fee is high, the conversion rate is below market rate, there is no way to lock-in rates and your conversion process takes almost an hour to complete. You would think an automated process would be way faster than this. So anyone trying to convert a huge amount of coins will likely suffer massive losses due to movement of exchange rate. I have myself suffered losses countless times.

Besides all this, if the exchange somehow gets stuck which happens all too often, god have mercy because many people have complained of no response to support tickets for 6-7 days. After waiting for a week, when you manually complete the exchange, the exchange rate is nowhere near the original rate at the time of conversion.

I have personally used both Bittrex and Poloniex - yes they have some restrictions but for most of the traders it is within their own limit. Anyway it is not advised to keep to many coins on an exchange, but rather trade slowly in short parts. Since you buy and sell coins on Bittrex and Poloniex which means that your rates are higher as you need to earn some money on this, same with shapeshift, their rates are higher.

It is way cheaper to buy on bittrex, polo , cryptopia or any other exchange than to use your service, one time I looked at your prices to buy some coins from fiat and exchange RATE is just to huge for me to afford your service, so I went to another exchange website. For some they might find your service convenient, but thats not me, sorry.

You may merge all in one transaction but still the amount of the fee that this guy paid is a lot, yes it was sorted out. But just imagine that all of the people to whom this fee was applied came to ask for refund? It would prob be to much to pay.

Gosh! What a near miss. I didn't see this thread before sending Changelly my fund yesterday for exchange. It's almost 24hrs now and I still haven't received my coins till date. Although not much, just 0.001btc for some dogecoins. But irrespective of the amount involved, Changelly should honour my deal with them.

Guys I am gonna by honest here. They are also humans. Most exchanges happen automaticly that is getting used by 1000's off people a day and increasing. Maybe 1 of those transactions can go wrong. They have to research that first. I had one off Gulden going wrong but it got solved nicely. I have done over 30 transactions without any problems. So to call them scammers is going too far in my book. If they refunded you I recommend removing the negative review and turn it into a neutral one at least if you are feeling unsatisfied. I am leaving a positive review because they did nothing wrong in my case.