Bitcoin Forum

Hello everybody.
As a new forum member I am resorted to posting it here rather than in Cavirtex (Canadian bitcoin exchange) thread.
Recently Cavirtex, introduced an absolutely ridiculous new fee: inactivity fee.
They will be charging 50$ a month if you do not perform transactions during a year period.
For some people who created an account with them with a strategy to hold for a long term, that might spell very expensive bad news.

Cavirtex, are you out of your mind? Are you desperately trying to loose your customers?

If you are a Canadian and a Cavirtex customer, please express your opinion.
Also if you are a Canadian please let us know what alternative exchanges do you use?

$50 a month with no money in the account, or if it is funded?

My question to you, is are you out of your mind if you are holding funds, especially BTC with a third party? Bitcoin is made so YOU can control your funds. WTF are you doing leaving coins on their exchange?!?

If I've misunderstood, my apologies. What's the problem with keeping a couple bucks on there and once a year buying $1 worth of coins?

Why wouldn't you just hold on to them yourself?

I do not plan to hold any equity with them. BUT - they force most of their customers to verify themselves and to sign a "pre authorized debit" form which effectively lets them into your bank account, similar to how you allow your utility bill to be charged directly from your bank account. So when they fill like charging you 50$ a month, they simply charge your bank account. Funding an account with cavirtex costs 30$ and buying of small amounts of BTC is forbidden to prevent market manipulation.

Virtex is not a bank. You shouldn't use them like that.

They have had that inactivity fee for quite a while. They were very open in announcing it.
Why would anyone hold any money on an exchange for over a year?

Sorry, but you have completely missed the point. As a matter of fact your statement additionally emphesises the absurdity of the fee. In order to execute a single trade you have to have some cash in the account. To transfer the cash to Cavirtex from your bank will cost you 30$. Effectively you will either be forced to either pay the fee associated with buying, or you will have to pay 50$ a month. There is no other exchange, that I know of that has similar draconian rules.

If you have no money there you don't have to worry about losing any of it.  If you do have money there buy a small amount of BTC and you will have activity, which will keep you safe for another year of inactivity.    ::)

So the fee only occurs when you have funds in the account?  I just want to use the to buy or sell BTC, so if I don't buy/sell within a year it's a $50/month fee?

After a year of inactivity they will charge you a $50 fee every month until there are no funds in your account.

They don't want the risk of holding money for people for long periods of time. They don't want to act like a bank.

If one only wants to buy BTC infrequently then they should wait until they want to buy before transferring money there.

If one wants to store money there, for some odd reason, it isn't hard to be active.   

I remember some online poker sites doing this, and there being a lot of complaints from the community, but I'm not sure what was done about it. Pretty crappy policy, to be honest. Probably just trying to take "free money" from those that forgot about their accounts......

thanks. The way other people explained is that they would charge you a $50 fee regardless if you had any money in your account, so essential you would have to owe them money and they can withdraw it directly from your bank account.

Someone mentioned they had a negative balance in their account which is what concerned me.

I too have a serious problem with this that I posted about as the last post here:  https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=325980.0

Furthermore, not only did they charge this fee, but instead of charging me $50 they charged me 4BTC. I contacted support and they gave me  the "we are not a bank explanation" but totally failed to respond about the huge over charge.

What can we do about this?  Can anyone confirm that this inactivity fee was in the TOS since the beginning?

My biggest complaint is that I think they willfully decided against emailing out with this announcement.  I have received other announcements by email from them and there is a setting in the account prefs that defaults to "Include my address when sending bulletins"

lol -


Name:   abababab
Posts:   2
Activity:   1
Position:   Jr. Member
Date Registered:   November 06, 2013, 11:44:59 PM
Last Active:   Today at 11:28:24 PM

Lol, what a desperate cash grab  :D

It's about time to switch to another exchange. Anyone? What exchange could Canadians use? Preferably an exchange allowing to trade in Canadian dollars...

WTF, just use bitstamp. its great.

I don't believe you can buy with bitstamp in Canada directly from your bank account like Cavirtex can!

I don't understand your problem.  Its after 1 year of inactivity.  Just make a small trade before that time and your fine?  Stop whining like a little bitch.