This is why sending money upfront to any person or exchange is always risky. There is no guarantee that you will get what you paid for and there is nobody to help recover the money if anything goes wrong. The only thing you can do now is to wait and hope for them to respond and resolve your missing Swift transfer ASAP. Some of these exchanges do have solvency issues and will give you the silent treatment for ages (hopefully not indefinitely!).

SWIFT transfers are quite fast. Some even arrive within hours or faster after the sending bank executes the payment order so there really isn’t any valid reason to block access to funds sent on the dates you mentioned. I can think of only one reason... they are stalling access to your money while they use it (and those of others) for reasons we can only guess.

Four days? That's still within the comfort zone. I once needed to have my linked email address replaced with a new one. It took 2 months from request to job done. So many in-between steps. Sent ID... waited more than a week. Then they responded asking me to confirm transactions I did... waited more than a week again before I heard back from them. Then someone else from their support staff responded asking me to explain the problem... waited days again. Then the issue was escalated to security and compliance for approval. The entire process was a major test of patience.

They will eventually resolve and lift your account restrictions but you will need to be extremely patient with them.


 

You should have used escrow! This is what happens when you relax your guard for even a moment and send coins upfront. Scammers don’t sleep. They work here on 24 hr shifts. If they do sleep, another scammer takes over and looks for victims to target. They will scam just about any amount, even a day’s worth of food.

You sent coins upfront despite his horrible trust rating?

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=trust;u=1168554

One of the reasons behind the success of these scams is because scamming is a piece of cake for these criminals. People make it easy for them to do it.

Please use a trusted escrow the next time you trade with anyone.

All the ingredients of a disaster are on this thread. No evidence of coins... an account born recently... wild figures meant to entice... anonymous communication... millions of dollars without justified source or proof of coins...

Yes to escrow is the interesting bit. Who will you engage as escrow? If it is one of the trusted escrow providers on this forum, then I will gladly retract my assumptions above and apologize. If you intend to suggest an external “escrow”, then my assumptions stand as written.

Collateral, good sir. Collateral. Why is this concept of protecting the lender extremely difficult to understand? You are not personally related to any of the lenders here and you want to borrow money from a stranger. How can one overcome the shame of borrowing money without pledging something in return of equal or more value? The courage to do this, the shamelessness even, is probably possible because of the relative anonymity enjoyed by users here.

Without collateral borrowing is similar to begging, just less obvious and blunt because of all these vague promises to repay at some point in the future.

Strange of most borrowers to never mention anything about collateral. It’s as if they either intentionally ignore it or they deny it’s required when borrowing money. I checked other threads and they all seem to have a pattern of wanting money but not caring about the lender’s safety.

All these business plans and proposals are exciting and maybe even genuine but without valid collateral borrowing money from strangers is an uncomfortable thing to do. I can’t picture myself approaching people I don’t know and asking them to lend me thousands of $.

I recommend Mistertango. Been using the card since August last year. No issues whatsoever.

Decent transaction limits. Simple and uncomplicated on-app identity verification system.

You get an IBAN account and a free MasterCard linked to it. The card is the embossed type, accepted globally and has the secure EMV chip embedded on it.

The account can be loaded with bitcoins. That’s the best part.

It's a risk for him because he thinks saying so might convince just about anyone here to accept that as a passable reason and proceed with blindly sending him 80k USD.

How much did you pay for this hero account?


I know you need collateral worth much more than $80k but just to make us all happy and assuming someone does accept your counter offered collateral worth 1.00x please sign an address showing $80k worth of coins.

I used to have a WageCan card last year. Support was average and their card-issuing bank was horrible. I was fully KYC-verified by their bank and was required to reverify myself when I attempted to load coins on my card. It was not a nice experience. Firstly, the card loading process is not instant. It takes a few days and even more than a week if weekends and public holidays fall on those days after you load the card. That’s exactly what happened to me. To top it off, I was required to reverify myself despite having been fully verified by their bank. This resulted in an even much longer card loading time.

I cannot recommend this card but of course you are all adults and can consciously and independently decide what to do so the decision is ultimately yours to make.

They seem to be very active here when the rest of the exchanges lose their card-issuing privileges.

Just have a look at their card price. They know about Wave Crest’s downfall and they now have sole control of the crypto card market. A monopoly, for want of a better word, which explains the $230 price tag of the card.

Try Mistertango and their free MasterCard. Now that Wave Crest cards are no longer valid, that’s one alternative to consider.

I used to have a WageCan card but was very disappointed with their service. I cannot recommend it.

In the absence of options, it seems P2P trading is one of the few remaining ways to convert coins to cash.

There is another less known and used system of transferring money called Visa Personal Payments. Has anyone tried it?

Why would one trust you to act as escrow? Where is the extensive green trust? References from DT members who can vouch for your credibility? The years and years and years of honest trades?

Searching for them but I can’t find any.

If it is a compliance-conscious exchange, excessive account activity might lead to greater scrutiny and inquiries about the nature of the transactions, the source of funds and might even trigger a review of your KYC credentials. Exchanges are happy to see revenue pouring into their coffers from trading activities but the regulated ones (like Bitstamp) jealously protect their accreditation and will close accounts and terminate relationships if they detect account activites which go against their AML terms.

If your account is verified and all your transactions are justifiably legal, then getting banned is still a risk to expect but it is a quantifiable risk, meaning you can avoid it by trading within certain limits and being sure you can explain the nature and source of those coins or funds.

As for the less legitimate exchanges, you might get banned if your account has a balance which they deem worth stealing.

Borrowing $34,000 without valid collateral is just wrong. It’s almost like a crime. Offering to repay with 50% interest makies it one.

Names, personal data and contracts are all worthless collateral. They can’t be sold or auctioned off if the loan is not repaid.

No lender or investor will lend you this money. Sorry for the bad news but the cold hard truth is no collateral, no loan. It’s extremely difficult to borrow 0.001 BTC here without collateral. How much more if you were to borrow 2 BTC!

Try borrowing from your family and friends. If you have real estate property and you are convinced your crypto farm project can achieve a high enough ROI to repay the principal + interest, then banks might give you a loan against that property.

If you have nothing to offer as collateral, borrowing 2 bitcoins will never happen.

Edit your lending terms. You forgot to mention that extremely important piece of information about escrow holding the collateral. Have you chosen anyone from the official escrow list? We all know how embarrassing and shameful it is to be labeled a collateral scammer! I would melt from shame if someone were to accuse me of being such a scammer! I’m sure you too attach value to your reputation and good name so go ahead and edit that first post of yours above and very clearly mention and insert this line: COLLATERAL WILL BE HELD BY A TRUSTED ESCROW.

Looking forward to seeing it when I next visit your thread!

Visa said the cards had been suspended after Visa terminated WaveCrest's membership due to "continued non-compliance with our operating rules", although it said other Visa cards that convert Bitcoin into normal currency would not be affected.

"Visa has other approved card programmes that use fiat funds converted from cryptocurrency in a number of jurisdictions. The termination of WaveCrest’s Visa membership does not affect these other products."

As quoted from The Telegraph link above.

I would very much want to know the websites of these approved card programmes and their jurisdictions. Apart from Wave Crest, which other approved providers offer crypto-funded Visa cards?

Can anyone shed light please?

Did they suspend their entire cards? I know they suspended those of cardholders from non-EU countries. Is this a new crackdown aimed at those living in Europe too?

If this is a total and global suspension of all Wave Crest cards, we have limited alternatives left. Mistertango is a good one.

I wonder what triggered this much more intense crackdown. Must be the U.S. again hating on bitcoin.

Meet in a safe place and ascertain cash is genuine. Best to meet in a bank. Stay safe by refusing any offer to transact in a remote location. Don’t get into a stranger’s car, even if the offered buy rate is temptingly better than those of other buyers. Crypto criminals have a history of offering to buy coins and pay generous rates. The seller is then taken to a remote location, assaulted and forced to transfer the coins under threat of harm or worse.

If, for example, you are told that the transaction will take place in an office or you will be taken to someone’s house, think carefully before accepting.

You will need valid collateral. Full member and senior accounts are nowhere worth $500.

And escrowing of collateral is an absolute must if the lender has no reputation and established presence here. Lots of newbies and fly by night lenders offer loans on the condition that they receive collateral first. They are almost always collateral scammers.

Without valid collateral worth at least 500 x 1.2 = $600 or more, nobody will lend $500.

How safe is the wallet if or when released? Obviously, using this wallet would mean trusting the wallet's developer or creator. And, most importantly, being convinced that such wallets are at no risk of being accessed via a backdoor system.

I love the idea of engraving both the public and private keys on the card, protected by a passphrase-protected Bitcoin private key. Is it really secure? I mean is there any way to reverse engineer the encoding in any way? Sorry for asking. Just paranoid about these things. I always believe that a private key, encrypted or not and in whichever format it is generated, is only secure if it is known to and controlled by the wallet's owner and nobody else.

If it is really secure and impenetrable, I would love to have one of these cards and will be happy to support the Kickstarter. I do want to see the earlier question answered: what if the project fails to achieve full funding? Would you still move forward with it?

Almost $2000 just for fees? That's insanely high.

On a side note, I came across a thread about Segwit-supported wallets and was wondering if they really help keep fees low. When using such wallets, will the more economical fee affect the speed of confirmation? Or is it identical to transactions performed on non-Segwit wallets? If it's just as fast, is it because certain blocks are used for Segwit transactions? If anyone can shed light to this, thanks a lot.

Which wallets support Segwit? I want to start using one, preferably a stable and trusted wallet with private keys known to the user only.