All these exchanges share the same fate. Their cards will cease to work from 15 October 2017 for all card holders whose registered KYC addresses are not included in the allowed countries list.

At this time, the best and only option is to wait for a more lasting solution. I hope there will be positive developments soon.

This is not good.

I offloaded all funds from the new cards and converted them to bitcoin, then sent them to my external wallet. Trust is central and core to all bitcoin trades, whether they are done person to person or with established exchanges. One small slip and that trust is eroded.

Luckily I have two backup bitcoin cards.

That's good. All card providers should do that to make it difficult for scammers to steal and cheat their victims!

All card accounts, virtual or plastic, should be verified and KYC'd. This will make life harder for these internet criminals. All this anonymity is what encourages fraud to thrive.

Please stop prioritizing your ICO project. What's most important at this point is your customers' convenience and satisfaction. Fix your disrupted card loading service if you want to win everyone's trust in your system.

Cards cannot be loaded since the day before yesterday and this is not good for volatile assets. Fix this please.

I do not understand why, despite the countless complaints and scam accusations here, so many are still confident in trading on this exchange. It's as if they read the scam stories but then are all "neuralyzed" by the same neuralyzer seen on the Men on Black movie.

You will need a ton of patience if you want to wait for Yobit to return stuck funds. That's if they even decide to return it, the chances of which are slim or even nil.

You need to pass their stringent and rigorous KYC verification checks before you can trade or transact with them without headaches. Yes, they are FinCEN licensed and regulated but they operate under strict government guidelines governing money movements.

What I find surprising is your post above about Coinbase not allowing US customers when in fact they are a US based exchange and usually cater to US residents first and foremost. Care to explain more?

Weird. Why would anyone consider you as a trustworthy escrow? It's not like you have a well-aged account here with tons of feedback showing successful transactions. Even if, say, you were the OP's neighbor how would you guarantee that you would ship, let alone pay the bitcoins to the OP.

The escrow process involves the buyer sending you bitcoins upfront. This requires an enormous level of trust. A trust hinging on a genuine intent to pay those bitcoins to the seller (OP) and to ship the purchased items to the buyer.

Where is the coin listed? Where is the reference rate?

All these weird fly by night coins with no spending or retail value. Bitcoin is a far more trustworthy asset for me. Not sure what one would or could with a Regal Coin. And to think 200 of it would be worth $6000+ as claimed in your post above? How can one recover that value if the coin has no stable market presence?

It's a strange and also funny concept. No wonder governments and the public in general have very little confidence in cryptocurrencies as reliable investment instruments. You have all these new coins popping up like mushrooms every week. What's next? Choco coin? Husky coin? iPhone coin?

This kind of trade should not be encouraged. And what do you think the senior member account will be used for? That's right, for scams, for defrauding signature campaigns, for misleading others here, for convincing less senior members to send payment first. Things like that.

Seller, buyer and traded account should all be tagged and negged. Or perhaps neutral feedback about the account being a bought one.

Selling and buying accounts puts other people at risk. There are more cons than pros in deals involving the sale of senior accounts to newbies. In fact, there is nothing positive about such trades at all.

ViaBTC still offers the transaction accelerator? Didn't they mention something about shifting their operations outside China? This would mean a disruption in their services. Not sure if the move to another jurisdiction will affect their transaction accelerator. Or are they still based in China?

I used their accelerator a few times earlier this year and it does work. There was a time when it took ages for them to mine a block and I had to wait longer. A few hours.

Try to accelerate the transaction in the first few seconds after the hour. That's the small time window when you have a chance of success.

50 to 100 BTC per week is indeed doable through major exchanges such as Bitstamp but you will need to pass their KYC/AML requirements which takes time. Then of course you have these German banks which traditionally restrict payments for bitcoin-related transactions. They usually err on the safe side and decline the transaction and ask for a pile of documents. Especially for 100 BTC or something like EUR 350,000. Lots of questions for sure.

Cash is just as suspicious and worrying. It will be difficult to find someone willing to meet at a Hauptbahnhof to do the deal.

The only issue is you have a new account and it would be good if you could be more transparent about the transaction procedure such as where and how you intend to pay for the 50 to 100 btc. Obviously it would be good and safe to transact inside one of the Sparkasse or main German banks to check and verify the money.

There is also the issue of safety. As you might have heard, there were incidents of people meeting up and being mugged and assaulted by a group of people, forced to transfer the bitcoins.

You may have been inconvenienced by what they did but the main and important thing here is you didn't and won't lose the bulk of your money. Your experience with them is unfortunate but still way better than less reputable exchanges which are far more likely to steal your entire funds. Consider yourself lucky to see this money returned to you. There are some here who lost far greater amounts to exchanges (such as Poloniex and BTC-E) who give them the much hated silent treatment for weeks or even months at end. Some simply ignore them forever. Some ask for a never-ending list of documents.

 

Yes, the conversion rate is a bit on the high side but think again, this entire process is a tremendous convenience for those who need their coins converted to cash quickly and safely. From your bitcoin wallet to Cryptopay's app, then from there to the ATM. In fact, you could the entire procedure within seconds at the ATM or while queuing to pay for something. Times have never been this good and convenient for bitcoiners.

I don't mind paying the rather large margin there. Their overhead costs must be enormous. Staff, IT, cards, logistics, security etc.

Problem is they are the new card issuer of Wirex, Cryptopay etc. These contactless mastercards are issued by Psi Pay Ltd.

So far the cards work well. No issues with stores, online merchants and ATMs. I hope it stays that way. But now my trust is a bit shattered and I might limit amounts I store on these cards, despite their USD 5k per day withdrawal limit.

I'm sorry to read about your experience but I so love the way you despise anything related to or connected with the US. I too have a deep and unwavering hatred for anything which relates to that country. The people are fine but the government's disturbing habit of sticking it's nose deep into matters which are none of their business is a thorny topic for me. Intrusive, nosy and meddling would be just some of the adjectives I would use for this. Bitcoin is making slow and painful progress in integration with traditional banking and global commerce because of the US's unrelenting and shameless meddling in the financial affairs of both Americans and non-Americans.

Mayzus might be a dodgy exchange but if you look at the overall picture and dig deeper in to the more troubling aspects of this scam, you will find that it all boils down to the US's tight grip on the global financial markets (and the operating rules governing those markets) which caused all your difficulties and those of many others wondering why or how their monies are stuck and immovable.

Yep, confirmed scammer, thief and fraudster. People who do this day and night should be relieved of their right to co-exist with other human beings on this planet. Thieves like the OP of this thread were (unfortunately) born to steal from others. Shame on that OB/Gyn who helped give birth to this criminal.

Laws should be amended to make theft and fraud non-prescription offences. Just like murder. No statute of limitations. When you steal, you destroy people's lives. You destroy someone's hopes and opportunities. That is just as serious a felony as taking someone's life. Not sure why lawmakers don't consider locking up thieves forever.

Since that story above about the law being changed is unlikely to happen, the best option is to tag this account and waste his few minutes of creating it. He will be back. Count on it.

How to track it? Well, by checking your account to see if the transfer arrived or not. Or by asking the sending bank to do a trace of the transaction if it is taking unusually long for the transfer to arrive. Other than these two options, there is no other way. There is no database where you can check or track an ACH or SWIFT transaction. The one and only way is to ask the sending bank to trace it. They can do that but there might be a small fee.

Ok... let me start somewhere about this.

I have my new bitcoin (contactless) mastercard and they are issued by a company in the UK called PSI Pay Ltd. They work perfectly (ATMs, stores, merchants etc) and this gives me the confidence to use the cards for all my bitcoin to fiat transactions. Wave Crest was very good and reputationally reliable. It's a pain to have to say bye to this MyChoice visa card.

I happened to find this site today:

http://www.psi-payscam.com/

Or is this a once-off incident?

I don't know what to think. I don't want to wake up one day and discover the cards stopped working or see a "this domain has been seized" error on this company's homepage.

Why can't one of the regular time-tested brick and mortar banks offer their cards so we can all have some peace of mind!

I'm convinced they decided to close the account on account of such a large transaction not passing their AML rules, despite the supporting documents you submitted. They are licensed in Luxembourg and as such they are mandated to follow EU financial intelligence regs.

Even if you submit valid documents, they might rule on the balance of probabilities after considering the total relationship factors involved, such as your account age, the source of funds, even if legitimate, they might still be skeptical about it, especially because of the risk of trading on behalf of third parties which is a presumption that is difficult to rebut.

They are not a scam. A scam exchange will unlawfully retain and misappropriate your funds. In other words, a scam exchange will steal your coins or money.

As for their decision to return your money in fiat form, they are probably (and I'm just thinking this is the case) required by law to do so. I'm not familiar with AML laws in depth but I suppose they do this to ensure no funds are channeled to third parties (which bitcoin allows since you can request them to channel the coins to any random address). Banks do the same thing too. If they are unable to engage you as a client, they will return all funds to an account under your name. Sending the money to another account (on someone else's name) would make them a party or accomplice to laundering funds.