Bitcoin Forum

Hello

I'm wondering if you ever had a bad experience with crypto exchange, what was it and which exchange?

Feel free to share all kind of stories.

I personally have not had any bad experiences with crypto exchanges, but I use only my local exchanges which do not ask me (so far) for KYC, and they have very good support which solves any problem very fast.

Perhaps the biggest problem that can happen to you when using exchanges is that they get hacked, and in the biggest hack of one crypto exchange (Mt.Gox (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mt._Gox)) users lost 850 000 BTC which have not yet been returned. The second risk is that your documents that you submitted for KYC can be stolen and misused.

There is no doubt that the biggest risks are the loss of funds and identity theft, but there are also problems with deposits, withdrawals, coins sent to the wrong addresses, bad&slow support.

Please don't make a thread that will attract spammers.

You can find the answer to your question with Google. It's easy, and it will save some time for you.

Where is the wrong part of asking from people's experience? I would say OP is still new on crypto, that's why he need to make sure he didn't fall or having bad experienced like other people had. This is also prevent more people registering or using scam exchange sites.

I ever had bad experienced in many exchanges, some of them already closed. But the worst experience was I've registered on a site then several months later it closed (Liqui.io).

Cryptsy customer support way back 2016. This was during the time when Blackcoin was still a popular pump and dump coin (not proud of it) and I was on the move for capitalizing on price differences in Bittrex and Cryptsy. I was asking for a push in withdrawal but their support replied that it's an on-chain problem of Blackcoin and not from theirs that's why they can't push withdrawals. I tried again after an hour and a different reason came up, and for the third time until the price difference in-between exchanges diminished that it's no longer worth it to arbitrage anymore. They pushed the withdrawals right after that point, to which no profit can be made. Usually it is the customer support that tires me on an exchange and not the platform per se, and I believe similar cases here, too.

@SheriffEl I had bad experience with Cryptopia as it suddenly shut down, and I lost access to my coins worth $1500 back then and now their worth is only $31. Normally I have always advocated people to stay away from exchanges as they keep getting hacked, but it was my sheer bad luck that I forgot about my coins till it was too late. If you were looking to store your coin in exchanges, then I hope my post will help you understand why you should stay away from exchanges.

Details here: https://www.cryptopia.co.nz/

Because it is a very repetitive topic with a question/topic asked 100 times. He brings nothing new... If you check @OP posts history (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=2665692;sa=showPosts) you will notice he is no more than a pure shitposter, he has no interest in reading this conversation. Sorry to be rude but it's the truth.
There are many users like him. Like when you see a Hero member, in BTC for 4 years, and asking newbie questions?" Seriously?

"Feel free to share all kinds of stories," he says, oh yeah why he didn't start first?.

@Juggy777
I have been lucky with Cryptopia  

I have bad experiences with two exchanges: Cryptopia and Hitbtc. Cryptopia's hack and then bankruptcy made me lose $400 and hitbtc doesn't let me withdraw my coins as they want fee in fiat when the market has crashed long back.

Mt Gox first, lucky there didn't lost anything. Many friends did tho, which was big hit to them.
Then btc-e, lucky again, not keeping funds on exchanges is my decision tho.
Then couple more, all failed, all vanished due to technical issues or exit-scam (hack).

So overall... almost all exchanges i used not exist anymore, this is lesson to be learned here :)

Bitgrail. Luckily I didn't hold a lot of NANO then.

Lesson learned. I always transfer to my hardware wallet if coin is supported.

Well I had a terrible experience with an Exchange called coinsmarket. Held a lot of BTC there at the time of bull run. Suddenly the whole site went into maintenance until next notice. The next notice came after 3 months when they said that they are deciding to wind up their operations and they will disburse all payments of the holders. Unfortunately that day never came. Infact after a couple of months the hosting and domain of the exchange was expired and I never saw that exchange live again. The total amount was around 1.3 BTC at the time of Bull run which was worth much more than what it is now.

I see that all responses here are all about those exchanges who already turned into a scam and I don't think how knowing them will help you. Or if you really want to know about those exchanges, it's just one click away at your favorite and preferred search engine.

Why not just research or asked directly instead about some issues of currently active and operational exchanges today. In that way, it will help you to choose what's the best exchanges that might worth to put a risk so you will not end up on random exchanges.

There are various of experiences that you can read on the Exchanges for a particular exchange that has an announcement thread there.

--> https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=223.0

Mine was about their KYC,  I don't remember the exchange anymore.
When I registered on their exchange, there was no KYC things about. But I think a month or weeks after they required all the users that want to withdraw the funds to undergo with KYC.

That's the time I pissed, especially their third party KYC is so strict, since my Bitcoin on their exchange, I have no choice. So I submitted some documents of mine. I even got some renewal of my document before because they don't accept anymore those expired documents. Really hassle.

i had funds on bitfinex when they got hacked in 2016. my balance took a big haircut. i also lost a bunch of coins on btc-e in 2017 when the american government took them down.

fortunately, i've managed to avoid getting hassled over KYC or having my accounts hacked or closed, but i've certainly got some battle scars.

yes, I've had bad experience and I think many folks from bitcointalk suffered from closing of cryptopia exchange.
so for me it was not huge amount lost there, but my friend lost about 1.5 btc on cryptopia
and we have no idea if we ever could get it back..  other then that, usually all troubles with exchanges were covered by support.

 

Weirdly, knowing that a lot of people had some problems with certain exchanges, I never really had a bad experience. The probable reason why is that I really don't use those shadier exchanges, and while I pretty much only use the reputable exchanges, I almost never leave funds on exchanges for more than 24 hours. I pretty much execute the trades, and withdraw the funds almost immediately without wasting any time. That way, even if a reputable exchange gets hacked, I stay pretty much unaffected.

I've encounter a lot of problems with exchange and it's so many to list them up and I will just  write here I think the one who give impact on my side and that is when my funds is been hostage on Hitbtc and it toke many almost months before they fix my issues, also with p2pb2b where my earned tokens has been stuck since there's no actual volume and they require me a KYC so that I can withdraw my coins and literally I hate KYC so I forgot my tokens there, and lastly on cryptopia where they got hack and lose some mney with that events.

Newbies should really be careful on exchanges since some of them are totally bullshit but there's one exchange who really empress me and I think they are legit since when they encounter a hacking issue on there site they manage to return the funds of there users and they also make sure that there site security will be tighten more to avoid future problems and that's the binance exchange.

I am new and I saw few people commenting they had a bad experience with certain exchanges, wanted to hear if this happens regularly or just by chance.

Sorry to hear that. If the exchange shuts down and you have coins on that particular exchange do you loose them or..?

Lol people complain regularly about exchanges, legit or not. Even the most reputable "too big to scam you" ones like Coinbase get reports of account closures (https://www.reddit.com/r/CoinBase/comments/b03xj9/coinbase_closed_my_account_withdrew_all_the_funds/) and such, and what this should tell you is that you can't and shouldn't fully trust any of them. If you want to save yourself the headache of encountering problems yourself, all you have to do is avoid using them to store more money than you're willing to lose.

Considering that almost every question can be answered with the help of Google, it turns out that almost 90% of open threads on this forum have no purpose other than to attract spammers. Everyone is completely free to ask what they want, and also everyone is completely free to use "Report to moderator" button or to just ignore the whole thread.

I am curious to know, why do you want to know about the bad experience with the crypto exchange? Why not good experience? Because if we know the good experience about the exchange, then you will get to know the good things about that exchange. You can make a list of Good exchanges and review about that. Later you can use those exchange as a trading option.

You have to be careful with the newest exchanges. If you want to trade you can go with top exchanges. The next thing is don't use exchange for hodl your coins. Because the exchange wallets, private keys are won by the exchange. That means if someone hacks that exchange, your coins will be lost. You can buy a hardware wallet to store your coins. If you can't buy a hardware wallet, you can go with desktop wallets.

I lost a small amount of coins on a local exchange that got hacked, but it was a insignificant amount.  :(  The lesson I learnt from that, was not to store coins on an exchange as if you want to use it as a wallet.

I also had my one account locked, because I changed my cellphone number linked to the "security" features on the site and they did not want me to replace the old number with the new number, until I could verify that I owned the previous number that was used for the site.

I accepted the strict security requirements, because I would want them to implement that, if someone wanted to hack my account.  ;)

If you want to know reviews on a specific exchange, then I would advise you to use the search.
Personally, I had my first negative experience with the Idex exchange, but not through the fault of the exchange, but because of my ignorance.
On the index there is a minimum amount for order execution, I did not have enough. I decided to buy a coin that was not liquid and as a result I was able to sell it at a much lower price than I bought.

I used to use the poor Yobit exchange. They detained my 0.1 BTC and never returned it! I contacted the support team many times but they did nothing! After much effort to recover the money, I gave up! Stay away from Yobit trading platform.

I had an open sell order on Cryptopia for a relatively unknown coin that was trading there. It wasn't a lot. After that they closed down and everyone knows the rest. I though about using HitBTC a few years ago but I decided against doing that. I am glad I did since I have been reading different types of stories where users claim that their funds got locked away and they never managed to withdraw them.

Every single user can get a bad experience without any exchange
But im happy that for now i do not have this
Only successful transactions  8)

Not really much just that there was a day I intend to buy a coin on etherdelta and site was really lagging that particular day and i was in a haste to buy a specific coin, not knowing that I had input wrong parameters in the place of price per coin and the quantity I want to buy, I was so angry because that was not the first time of using etherdelta

If you want to know peoples experience on different exchanges then please check the reviews of the exchanges on platforms like trustpilot, bittrust etc., There are specific platform for the same also, in bitcointalk there is a separate session for discussing about exchanges.

The point is that all exchanges should give you a good experience, i'm asking for bad experiences so i know which ones to avoid.

I will try to mention some of the bad experiences I have had on several exchanges. But I will not mention the exchange because it can tarnish the good name of the company. The first is the problem of deposit, in some cases I have experienced deposit problems which have caused my funds to be delayed for more than 3 days, this is probably the most experienced thing for some new and unstable exchanges, as well as withdrawal problems, My funds have been delayed for more than 2 days. I think for cases like this the exchange should prioritize it because it has a very bad impact on the user's assets. I got a lot of losses because of that. And for the problem of losing assets I have never experienced it. I think lately some exchanges have increased security for the safety of users.

Make a deposit but not carefully see that the wallet is in a block far behind the current block, so it has to wait a long time untill the exchange is finished downloading all block from the wallet
Funds are held for months on an exchage because they are slow in handling KYC, thats my bad experience with exchange.

Even if you check the good experience you know which is the best and which one should you adopt. A exchange gets top reviews only when the users are satisfied. No exchange or service is 100% perfect there are both positive and negative experience.

Most importantly the experiences are dependent on both your knowledge and the exchange service.

Why I mentioned both was:

• If you do not known that there are certain set of confirmations required for a transaction to complete and just contact the exchange support and say, "I sent funds and your exchange/wallet is not showing it up", it does not mean that the exchange is bad, it reflects that the users knowledge is low.
• Other instance can be you miss the tag of double and blame exchange or wallet that it is not reflecting your funds and writing a review on the same is a clear stupidity and it does not mean that you should shop using that exchange or wallet.

I did not mean that all users do such stupidity. Let me explain with a instance

Check the bad reviews of binance :
https://www.trustpilot.com/review/binance.com?languages=en&stars=1

Almost all the reviews are spam. Top users of this community might have 99.99% used Binance at-least once in life time do they speak the same? No. Ask for your self why do not they because they have enough knowledge in the domain and they know what is going on.

On the other hand when you see the Excellent reviews of Binance, they have mentioned what mistake they did and how the support helped or what they feel about the exchange:
https://www.trustpilot.com/review/binance.com?languages=en&stars=5

Such statistical data speaks that the bad review givers are either the one with lack of knowledge or are spammers. This is why I also support going with good reviews but, read all reviews is the best and I do thank all platforms that help users to know the users experience so that, we know, where are we and what are we up to.

Of course you lose them. If they shut down from any reason ( they could be robbed, or them self rob and run away), who will send you coins you have there? Some other exchange? Some other guy? Who?


Things gets way more simple if you use exchange as an exchange and not as your wallet. You send coins to exchange, exchange it and withdraw.  It is that simple. Doing that you must be really unlucky to do that at times of a hack or any other troubles.

Stick to the popular exchanges. I've sometimes ventured for less popular exchanges to exchange my less popular coins and though I was not scammed, I had an unpleasant experience dealing with them.
Plan what are you doing with the coins beforehand. If you intend to exchange one coin to other and store in your wallet, use instant exchanges like shapeshift and fixedfloat. Traditional exchanges would cost you more as they have withdrawal fees.

Though it wasn’t that big and not really serious I may consider it bad when my funds was delayed upon conversion for at least almost 18 hours things that mean had to me because I need that money the very moment I withdraw,I don’t want to ruin the reputation sine it was our local exchange and what really happen is system failure to inform me about the availability of the said fund

Anyway it was settled the next morning so wasn’t that big deal though it was a experience with bad memory

Wow I think a more interesting question should be with which exchanges you have got a good experience...
Some have been hacked and closed like Cryptopia, some as run out of business like Liqui and Coin Exchange. Some instored KYC without warning like Poloniex, Kraken, Bittrex or 2FA like COSS. Some never gave airdrop as they promised like Hitbtc or only partially like Bitfinex... Some don't update wallets like Yobit. Most of them delist cryptos without warning or very short prior notice. In fact I don't know blameless exchanges.

I use coinbase for USD /BTC transactions and I use yobit to swap coins.  I’ve never had a bad experience with either. 

I have bad experience with mercatox and cryptopia.In 2017 made a withdrawal from mercatox and they sent my btc but the trx fee was too low.that trx was pending for 7 days and after that trx was canceled.then contacted with their support and then they paid my btc again. Last year I deposit 50$ ETH in cryptopia but balance was not added.then I opened a support ticket then they told me that my sending address is wrong and closed that ticket. but sending address was right.

I have a bitter experience in one of the market exchanges, where I deposited a number of altcoins, which totaled around 150USD, because there was an deposite event there, but for almost 4 hours I was waiting for it to not enter, I tried to email it and didn't reply until 2 days, after that I panicked, I thought maybe depositing / withdrawing was being maintained, so I waited for almost 1 week but suddenly the web closed / could not be opened, I was angry, sad, disappointed to be one, but let it be an experience teacher me, don't easily trust the new web.

"one of the market exchanges"? Why don't you name it? Please tell us which exchange it was, it's important to denounce the scammy exchanges.

Delays of KYC mostly. Other than that didn't have much bad experience.
Was lucky enough to always cash out from exchange before it collapsed.
Never keep funds on exchange, its like keeping money in bank but much much much much less secure.

This also goes for big exchanges like Binance etc.? You should not keep money there?

At least nothing significant. Anything can happen to an exchange, ranging from being hacked to being seized as an exchange, or your account in particular. Since the Exchange acts (normally) as a custodial of your assets, you are not really in full control of them. If worst comes to worst, you could end up losing all that you’ve got there. Not that is not necessarily going to happen, but it’s a risk, and as such, one that you need to ponder. (*)

I personally have some (small) assets on an exchange. Basically because in order to withdraw them the fee is too high in relation to the token amount, or the minimum amount to withdraw surpasses what I’ve got there (so I cannot withdraw it without purchasing more). It adds up to a small amount, so there is barely anything at risk. In addition, if you do frequent trades, you’ll probably consider having an operational amount on the exchange for readiness.

On the other hand, taking it off the exchange, whilst we all talk about it as a need to do thing, does require you to be able to be your own banker and manage your assets properly in terms of security (wallet, keys, etc.). That is not that simple for everybody, so many likely result to leaving their assets on the exchange. It’s a question of risked amount vs commodity, and each one on un needs to know where to draw the line.

(*) Binance was hacked a few months ago (see https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-08/crypto-exchange-giant-binance-reports-a-hack-of-7-000-bitcoin), but the amount was not a substantial dent and they covered the loss. Now if the amount hacked is large, then we’ll be talking abount Mt.Gox ++.

One of the worst exchange I have used so far was at Hitbtc , I deposited my tokens last year at this exchange wayback June 2018 if Im not mistaken because its the only exchange listed this token at that time thats why I decided to sell but bear market comes and price of this token fall hard like -80% from ICO price so I decided to withdraw and hold but the problem I cant withdraw because  fees are terrible, 90% of my tokens will be taken as withdrawal fees until now Im holding this token at hitbtc. 

BitBay, I'm really disappointed with its latest steps. Constant problems with deposits or withdrawals... I need to move to CoinDeal and I'm satisfied now. Everything works fine there so I can recommend it more than BitBay.

I guess its exrates where I wanted to exchange an coin but later realized that the price reported on coinmarket cap is just for trapping people,in reality the exchange orders for buying and selling with reported price will be in single figure of that coin but other coins were ordered for hundred times less than the actual market price,where I lost few hundred buck but sadly there is the only place I can convert it so just accepted it as loss and never wanted to use it anymore.

I forget what I've use before because of the security of the site I can't open my acc because of Google authenticator which you need KYC to open it but the requirements was I can't send because I don't have any requirements they need so the money was there been locked.

yes I have serious issues with 2 to 3 crypto trading exchange, I made wrong deposit while trying to deposit my token on Hitbtc, and other was forkdelt were I tried to deposit and my gas was consumed without the token being deposited. lastly was p2pb2b I was asked to passed the kyc and it gave a lot worries, though I submitted twice yet was not approved and what I was about to trade drastically depreciate.

It was your fault when you deposit in HitBTC so that isn't counted. For forkdelta I'm not sure what happen to that but probably the fees were too low, it usually happen when using MEW when setting to lower fees. It will try to send the tokens but only take the gas while the transfer of funds is unsuccessful.

I wonder why you tend to submit KYC to p2pb2b, there are more exchanges out there better than that. But I can understand if your got an airdrop and the tokens are only listed to this exchange.

I not had any problem with exchange fortunately, only some small issue because of problems that occured from forks for that coin at that time but was solved after, but now i use only coinbase and Binance.

When it comes to coinbase and Binance it's a smooth transition, even I use these exchanges mostly Binance as it has more options. I had a bad experience with shapeshift wherein I missed out to enter destination tag the the transaction was struck in the gateway as I was doing it in hurry in order to cash out I forgot to enter it and after a lengthy chat I got it back and by the time it was back market the value got changed drastically. It's one of my mistake which I still regret.

My own experience was with COSS exchange, I made a deposit of a coin and that deposit never arrived, when I made a complaint, the customer care agent didn't do anything about it and when I replied, it was ignored outrightly, it was eventually replied but it was already a year over when the deposit was made and the token was now worth less than nothing, I am just thankful that it's a  small token worth just $97 at the time, imagine if it had been my whole cryptocurrency portfolio, never trust these little exchanges, many of them are criminals. This happened in mid 2018, up till today, my deposit didnt show and it was never reversed.

So far I don't encounter a major problem on exchanges, just minor like withdrawal has not been process on time but it was fixed in a week.
Just a bit of advise if you dont plan to KYC on an exchange don't ever put your funds there, any exchange can change their terms and force everyone to KYC.

I had a really terrible experience with an exchange, I would rather like to withhold the exchange name for some reasons, firstly they made me go through hell just to fulfil their KYC requirements, I had to give up personal documents I ordinarily wouldn't have loved to do, that was during my first few years as a bitcoiner, I managed to successfully open the exchange and stored some of my coins there

After quite a long time, I hadn't logged in or followed up with the exchange, I then decided to login and check my coins only to find out that my account has been disabled due to maintenance and upgrade of their site(well that's what they claim), I tried contacting them, but it proved abortive, I lost quite some coins there, but it taught me a good lesson, as I have only operated with reputable exchanges since then, and I haven't had any issues, as I hardly leave my coins on exchanges anymore for more than necessary.

I have never experience this kind of issue with hitbtc but they have a huge delay when making a withdrawal but so far trading is really good and realtime.

And i think some of you here are still having problem with cryptopia and i still have my funds on my account and unable to withdraw it since they need to manually check or recover our account if they were able to do it and hopefullly.

Most common disappointment of a trader is when they think that exchange would not ask for KYC since they are not exceeding to what the exchange allowed limits. But once exchange feel or see some activities that they've think suspicious, they will ask for KYC and there's no question about it. Due to some reasons the rules might be change as the exchange will do investigations and they will freeze your account. Required KYC will be ask to provide for you to withdraw your money.

My worst experience in a exchange is when my depost of token and ithdrawal  of btc took 1 week before they process, if my token process on the day that i deposit i would make 1 btc  of it, but after a week i only got 0.4btc so disappointing.

I've experienced a stressful situation where i can't withdraw my funds because i need to do a KYC and they are rejecting it because i need to provide more personal information which is really not good because i am providing my details more in the internet.

And some exchanges are doing delaying tactics when making a withdrawal on my account and it would take 3-5 days before it complete. That's why i onky chose exchanges that is really has a good review and if its good to keep my funds withou any hassle.

I want to express some kind of scam happening with localbitcoin even though they have lot of security measures to save people from getting scammed.

I am trading too often on localbitcoin and there are some newbie will use you for laundering their money into bitcoin which was mostly happens through hacked account or unverified account,I didn't lost any money for this but there are some people who faced legal issues for their income transactions.

May i ask which exchange is that? I have to do KYC too as leaks on the internet are everyday problems. I believe that one of the main points of cryptocurrency is being anonymous.

I've only had one bad experience on an exchange. The name of the exchange is Liquid (previously QUOINE). I created an account there and sent some TPAY (Tokenpay) as it was one of the 'big' exchanges that listed TPAY at the time. However, I faced a major hurdle when I tried to withdraw. The exchange has a policy not to allow a withdrawal unless KYC details are submitted and approved. It took me a little over a year to get my account approved before I was able to withdraw my funds. My experience was nothing to write about as I was frustrated at most points duly to how they continously declined my ID documents throughout 2018. They approved my account  in 2019 via the same ID documents they've been declining since early 2018.

Darbfinance, at first this exchange seemed potential and was supported by many supporting partners, the staking program also worked well in a few months, after I was smooth with Kyc requirements and had made a deposit. they suddenly give an announcement to suddenly close the operation and ask users to move their assets. I did not understand what they were thinking because they seemed to intend to just finish after enjoying their coin sales funds.

I already had. What happens is that they hold my withdrawal in which I needed urgently. I have no choice but to wait until their evaluation has been concluded. What worse is that they required my to complete verification in their given time so that they can verify my identity and then process my withdrawal. This incedent is too inconvenient to me and hoping not to happen to anyone.

Since I started trading, I have had bad experiences with just 2 exchanges in the past.
1. COSS: I made a deposit in the exchange but my deposit didnt show in my account, I fired the support an email and after some weeks, they replied and told me to have patience because some deposits take time (imagine after 2 weeks) and I replied them that they should rectify it because it has been weeks since the incident happened, they didn't reply that mail until over a year after I sent it, very terrible exchange.

2. Coinegg: I had some tokens I wanted to sell in Coinegg, after selling the tokens, I discovered that I couldn't withdraw without completing the KYC process, so I tried to do it and they rejected it, they specified that I had to use an international passport, even my national ID card that I used to pass in all major exchanges got rejected by them, j have the passport but I just don't to use it, the funds was small so I just left it there.

my worth experience had been on Crypto-Bridge which had killed one of my favorite alts

aside from their awful interface, high fee and slow servers,  they did messed on a project by staking with all deposits of users and a clever smart-A kid got all those staked coins and killed the altcoin price from 0.01btc to 0 by cleaning the sell wall of orders

that was a project i was counting on too much, developers had been forced to swap their coins to a completely new network to try to fix the mess but ...

there was my nightmare on crypto world since i have joined