Someone has temper management issues. This is usually symptoms of a struck nerve or an exposed modus operandi.

The risk of counterfeit cash and buy-then-assault transactions is a very real and dangerous pattern of events occurring in Europe so these are justified concerns voiced in comments above. Showing anger only exacerbates these concerns and suspicion. Legitimacy is best shown by communicating in an educated and civil way.

You are proposing to buy USD 160k to 240k worth of bitcoins. Europe is awash with counterfeit cash which is why you cannot possibly expect or demand that people force themselves to feel relaxed about this transaction.

I have written to their support system just now, letting them know about this matter and advising them to comment here in their defense or risk being branded as a fraud.

Don't let them take control of your life in such a pernicious and damaging manner. If they are thieves, they should be properly and appropriately outed as such and should be publicly branded as fraudsters. Scammers and thieves are some of the most despicable form of humans on this planet. Don't let them take advantage of assets by giving them hope that you might simply give up and let the matter rest in their favor.

Exchanges confiscating rightful assets of their customers and locking accounts is becoming a very damaging cycle and pattern this year. They seem to think they are untouchable or even immune to litigation and prosecution, possibly by justifying these thefts as necessary AML and KYC procedures.

SimpleFX, right this wrong!

The best wallet is one which you independently control, one with private keys you and you alone know.

An exchange is never a good choice for short and long term storage of coins. Exchanges are prone to risks such as insider fraud, blockage and locking of accounts and assets, bankruptcy and seizure by authorities. An offline or paper wallet would be a safer storage option.

There are also good wallets which are time tested and proven as robust and safe. One of which is the Bread wallet. A little paranoia helps and is even healthy for making safe financial decisions. When setting up wallets, set it up on a safe platform or an environment free from online and offline intrusions. Common sense helps such as avoiding public or shared WiFi on devices where you store your coins, avoid adding third party keyboards and apps on the same device hosting your wallet app. 2FA and strong unique passwords are a must.

And lastly, on top of all the safety precautions above, always think before acting. By this I mean think carefully when someone or anyone offers something too good to be true. There is always a motive when you get an unsolicited PM.

And never transact without escrow protection.

I can highly recommend using Mistertango's account and card products. I use it and been happy since the day I got the card. The account is free and you can open it online. The app is user friendly and easy to use. You can do SEPA transfers to other banks participating in the IBAN system.

The card is a life saver. Cryptopay deactivated my MyChoice visa card after Visa Europe acquired Wave Crest. Thankfully I had this back up plan.

There are countless other EU accounts but most require that you open them on site at a physical branch. I also have an account with DKB in Germany which I opened online and while living outside Germany. That was back in 2011. Not sure if the rules have changed but this is one bank that gives me peace of mind. I don't use DKB for bitcoin transactions. They are known to be anti-bitcoin but the nice thing is I can sell my bitcoins to Mistertango and move some of the money by SEPA to my German account.

Even stronger evidence now that this is an exchange with a functionally kaput system. Either an unreliable accounting system or a sophisticated insider scam. Account records and audit trails are nonexistent or maybe they deliberately erase them to remove all evidence of account activity.

So unless you took screen shots of your transactions, any coins you still had on the account are now legally theirs. They own and control the private keys of your account so any coins you had on the account are theirs. This might sound cruel but this is the bitter reality of keeping coins in a wallet with private keys you and you alone do not know and control.

It's scary enough that they were able to erase all your transaction records (and balances) without involving any form of authentication or permission from you. Not even an email-based verification token to remove or erase those records.

There are so many red flags. First, your Localbitcoins account which was opened 50 hours ago. Yes I see your email, phone number and ID are all verified but that could just be part of one elaborate strategy. You had two previous deals.. with whom? Other accounts you control? Sorry for being suspicious but you have to understand that Localbitcoin's escrow protection cannot offer protection when PayPal and Venmo are involved as payment methods.

Interesting that you are offering only those payment methods which are highly risky. If not PayPal, Venmo. Either or. No other options which are not reversible.

Then you have those little things which others might not notice:

https://i.imgur.com/pZKkdIY.png

An upper trade limit of EUR 450,000 by PayPal? So hypothetically if someone opens a trade to sell 28 bitcoins, you would be able to send them EUR 450,000 by PayPal?

There is more to this than simply asking for trusted members only. Don't forget this is a two way street. You too have to be trusted to send something as poisonous as PayPal. I say poisonous because of the risk of reversibility up to 180 days. Friends and family is very much reversible if the transaction was funded with a compromised funding source or if the $2600 was paid to your PayPal account by someone who later disputes the transaction by telling PayPal something along the lines of "i paid but i didn't get the car he advertised on craigslist".

Escrow can offer no protection when PayPal is involved. That's because the risk of reversibility defeats the very purpose of using escrow.

This is not going to be easy. You should try Virwox but their rates will be just as bad as any risk taker here.

Expect to be tagged soon. A DT member will soon see your post and award you the coveted red medal. Should be today or tomorrow at latest.

If indeed you have a "coin doubler" why advertise here? You could double your own coins countless times, exponentially even, and live the high life.

But I will tell you why you're advertising here. It's because this coin doubler is a scam. It's a poorly designed scam so I'm sure you will be back with a new account, complete with new ideas, perhaps a coin tripler or quadrupler.

This exchange is showing all the colors of an elaborate scam and it is manned by scammers. Verified or unverified, accounts are locked and trades are blocked. People should stop sending coins to their hot wallets. Stop feeding them more coins.

Complaints are ignored and nobody knows how to reach them to resolve all these open tickets. Their Nevada address seems to be a mail drop address. Where exactly are their brick and mortar offices? Amazing how exchanges can gain the trust of thousands despite having no verifiable physical offices, phone numbers, management and staff names, operational audit trails..

This is a nightmare. They don't give updates. They keep their customers in the dark and their entire user base is given the silent treatment.

Definitely and without question a scammer. Creative and pesky thieves lurking on this forum waiting for the right moment to strike. And PM is the preferred tool. They think everyone's too naive to fall for their scams.

Someone with DT trust should tag this scammer. I know he will probably open a new account but it's satisfying to see them make an effort, only to find out that it was a waste of time.

Thanks for sharing this with the community. Information like this helps everyone here to be aware and beware of these thieves.

Extremely easy to reverse a Venmo payment. Their T&C prohibit using their services for bitcoin transactions. If the buyer disputes the transaction, it's almost always an automatic reversal.

Nobody should do this. Avoid Venmo like the plague. It's almost Christmas and scammers are even more desperate for coins and will do and say anything to get them.

There is no escrow protection and I don't believe seasoned escrows here will secure this transaction if they know Venmo is part of the equation. The idea of using a reversible payment method defeats the very purpose of an escrowed transaction.

If anyone wants to do this transaction with OP, insist on a safer payment method.

You will need to be more vocal and public about how you "will try to meet the payment requirements".

In fact, no, you must not try to meet them. You must pay.

Indian phone number. Right. This opens up a can of worms. Paying from India to overseas is restricted by the Reserve Bank of India and it is a risky and complicated procedure. Prone to reversals and fraudulent loopholes. Non-India based sellers beware when selling coins to a buyer in India, unless you have a domestic Indian bank account the buyer can pay into. Because of the RBI restrictions, there is an elevated risk of MITM scams, meaning the buyer would use someone (a third party) based outside India to do the payment. And we all know what risks are involved (hint: craigslist and other scams)

Another variant is PayPal payment. Indian freelancers might find it hard to withdraw from their PayPal account to an Indian account so they might try to bypass this by offering to pay for the coins by PayPal. And again we all know about the reversibility risk here.

This happened to me once, back when I still had the Wave Crest card. It took ages (a month) for the blocked funds to be available for spending again.

There are two options: 1) if the merchant (the online shop) is trustworthy, contact them (the merchant) and ask them to reverse or cancel the second transaction or 2) dispute the transaction by contacting Cryptopay who in turn will contact the card issuer to initiate a charge-back or a dispute of the second payment. The dispute will take time because Visa will give the merchant an opportunity to defend itself from your requested charge back. A lot of time. Weeks (in my case it took a month). I didn't dispute. Wave Crest told me if the merchant doesn't settle the second payment, Visa will automatically credit the funds back to my card. And they did.

If you want the money credited back to your card ASAP, you must proactively work on the matter by contacting the merchant. The merchant should reach out to their bank and have the second payment cancelled and Visa informed of that cancellation.

The idea is to appease you, to keep you relaxed and quiet while they fleece more coins from the naive few (or maybe even the naive many here). That's the plan.

The more you panic, the louder you shout scam here, the lesser their chances of raking in more coins.

I will retract and edit what I just wrote above if complaints are resolved to the satisfaction of all those who lost coins. But this is becoming a pattern in the exchange industry, this locking and blocking of accounts while coins sit on their hot wallets for ages.

Their earlier response was meant to encourage you to write something along the lines of "i guess i overreacted, all's good, nothing's wrong, go ahead guys send them more coins"

This is wrong.. very wrong. The right, safe and legitimate way of doing this is for you to escrow a certain amount of bitcoins with a trusted escrow provider here who will hold or reserve the coins for the safety of those entrusting you with phones, gadgets and other items of value.

Asking people here to trust you outright and blindly is not a legitimate practice and is not acceptable. Let's hypothetically reverse roles here. Would you accept an arrangement where the shipper asks you to send the bitcoins first? I find it wrong (not just in this case but generally) when someone begs to be trusted while that same trust can't be reciprocated.

I remember an incident involving an Indian buyer of some of my coins last year and he kept talking like a broken radio... "brother, you can trust me, send the coins first and i will send your money at western union within the hour. my brother, you can trust me, i'm a good man and i am a businessman, we can do good business my brother".. he kept spewing this garbage about how trustworthy he is, how he never stole a single rupee in his life. As for sending payment first, that was out of the question for him. In other words, he is to be trusted while I'm not. There's something deceptive and cunning when someone addresses you as brother, friend, sweety pie, cookie and all along he doesn't trust you.

Use an escrow service. When bitcoins enter the equation in any transaction, assurances should be given both ways.

No. You must discuss it here. This is a public forum and risky offers must be vetted and assessed publicly by seasoned members of this site.

I suspect the reason for desperately and stubbornly wanting to discuss privately is because you want to find a few naive candidates for your elaborate and sophisticated behind-the-scenes con artistry. PM, Skype , ICQ and all these shady chat apps are the preferred playground of scammers. They can financially rape their victims undisturbed.

PMs also make one suspect another motive: you get to "discuss" the proposal with multiple people, thus potentially increasing your chances of extracting multiples of 0.2 BTC.

I suggest you talk here. People are excited and waiting to read about your grand plans to engage investors cum donors.

I actually laughed out loud while at Starbucks when I read this part. I couldn't help myself.

People will say anything for coins. This is the true power of money. All those thought permutations in the human brain looking for cunning ways to convince others to part with their valuables. It's what sets us apart from the rest of the animal world.

2 BTC for the development of "mathematical formulations to adhere to the laws of physics". I need a deodorizer to mask the heavy stink here.

Instead, it's the exchange that's profiting. This seems to be a very lucrative way to supplement their revenues. They indefinitely and selectively lock accounts and use the balances of those accounts to gain profits simply by trading them based on market conditions.

And they have the audacity to enforce complicated terms and procedures for customers to regain access to these assets. It's legal thievery. Organized fraud.

There should be a way for customers who are enticed or invited to sign up for exchange account to also compel these exchanges to accept their customer's terms and conditions and click an "I accept" button for that. I know it will never happen but come to think of it, why are the exchanges the only ones allowed to have terms and conditions?

Why can't you just send the bitcoins from your blockchain wallet to your new wallet? That would be the easiest solution here.

I remember doing this once. I wanted a specific address on my blockchain wallet (and the private key). What you will need is your 12-word recovery phrase. Using the BIP39 mnemonic code converter, you can then derive the private keys of all the addresses on your blockchain wallet. You can get that converter here https://github.com/iancoleman/bip39

After converting, the addresses and their corresponding private keys will appear under "Derived Addresses"

There should be a blacklist or hall of shame thread for rogue exchanges stickied on this scam section. People often complain when it's too late. Coins forever gone and they are getting the silent treatment for weeks or months.

10 BTC. That's a lot of money to lose. I'm not sure if you stand a chance of recovering them. This is an exchange notorious for having an unresponsive support system. They don't seem to care about their exchange's reputation here. Why would they? Many don't do their due diligence. They keep blindly sending coins to Yobit's hot wallets without first performing a simple google search.

The exchange operates in Russia, a country where engaging the police and courts will get you nowhere.