Oh jeez. I'm not saying I buy their excuse but if it is true they have poor cybersec as they seem to not have backups/enough backups.

As for recovering, your friend's coins sits at STEX's wallets hence their hand is needed.

Some suggestions:

1. Try to reach out and follow up thru their other channels - perhaps their social media are still active or you know other email address. Side note: i think it's not a bad idea to send another email to recovery@stex.com
2. Make noise in crypto communities - I would target the popular places first
3. Lawyer up - expensive and complicated. also know that I'm suggesting this without knowing your situation e.g. how much have you lost, where you're from etc.

In any case, whole situation is vague and sus. I've no idea how are they gonna verify information from users... for starters, screenshots can be manipulated... perhaps signed messages from a user's known addresses (judging from their deposit and withdrawals)? but that would require enough user data from STEX.

I wouldn't be surprised if they went, "sorry we can't verify this from the scraps of data we have, it is out of our hands" 

Their reputation and if the platform fits my use-case.

Another thing is how true are their claims... For instance, a lot of these so called "DEXes" aren't actually decentralized as they implement KYC, block countries, rely on centralized servers, etc. Right now, only BISQ is actually decentralized.

Sad to say, it's pretty common with centralized exchanges to be super vague about the reasons why they suspend/freeze accounts. I don't think such action indicates colluding. In fact, Coinbase (if they want to) could scam people without the help of this no-name platform.

But yeahh, Coinbase is known to have stricter protocols which is one of the reasons why I don't like using them... I'm not sure what to suggest aside from regular follow ups through social media e.g. r/coinbase

About your funds sent by the supposed scam website, can I affirm the transaction is real and not some trust me bro? this means you see it in your CB wallet or block explorer?

1. Make use Viabtc's TX accelerator, see: https://www.viabtc.com/tools/txaccelerator/


2. Look into exchanges that supports LN, see: https://lightningnetworkstores.com/?tags=exchange

If you're not familiar with LN, see: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5158920.0

You could only use it to reduce/save fee on "your" transactions. For instance, if you setup a transaction in a way where it meets Viabtc's minimum conditions, you could stay below the recommended fee rate and still have your transaction confirmed within a reasonable amount of time.

Try to also report it using the 'report to admin' button below because unsolicited PMs especially those containing promotional content is against the rules.

I grew up in a religious household and although I don't practice it anymore. I would still feel uncomfortable calling him a saint lol.

Because in our terms, saints were someone people worship and/or deemed to be a holy being hahaha which would be overboard.

Reminds me of the hotbit case where some key people were investigated which apparently led to freezing of funds. Regardless of whether this case is true or not/how much is the truth, similar scheme is likely to be used by other CEx as an excuse to withhold user funds. Worst bit is information will probably only come from the exchange itself hence I can see why people would be on the fence.

On another note, Coingeko has also issued a warning: https://www.coingecko.com/en/exchanges/bkex

You could also try to look into these places:

1. https://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinUK/wiki/buy/
2. https://buybitcoinworldwide.com/

They're just research materials. Ultimately, you still have to verify if an exchange fit your use case the best plus its reputation.

Let me clarify something op. Did you check the 'minimum deposit amount' right before you made a deposit? or you just assumed it was still the same as April and just went for it?

If it's the latter, I wouldn't blame it on OKX. Truthfully, not paying attention on your deposit page 'right before' you deposit will likely expose you to mistakes such as this therefore jumping ships may not help much unless you fix this habit.

For an entirely different reason though, better switch/lessen your usage on OKX if you do not want to KYC with them because they are one step away from implementing mandatory verification and who knows if they'll be nice enough to let KYC1 people to withdraw first.

I would be very careful about this "someone" who talked you into this. Surely someone with "deep knowledge about cryptocurrency" would know this is a scam as it is pretty obvious you would only need to rely on one's common sense. Just saying because scam DMs are pretty rampant where someone pretends to be doing you a favor when they're actually luring you to a lion's den.

A common characteristic of ponzi scheme/scams are the extremely high profits as that would mean it's unsustainable. 3% daily is 90% monthly and 2% daily is 60% - these rates are in dream land. On their FAQ, they're advertising this as entirely risk free investment and there is no such thing, every investment has risk. And as pointed out above, if we apply this in actual mining, the more reason it doesn't make sense.

Perhaps business did not fare well.

If on-chain transactions were free, this means they were shouldering the miner fee, in other words, extra expenses.


QR code of what? does it contain his private keys? if so, it just means your brother in law is bad at self-custody. The app is custodial so I wouldn't say it should be his "should have" for storing decent amounts rather, he should've researched first what he's getting into and practice good self-custody habits.


Nice to see that they're being respectful to their users. I've no complaints over their offboarding process. 2 months to withdraw bitcoin/cryptos then after that, funds would be converted to fiat and be sent to users nominated bank. It appears continuous notifications would be sent out during the process as well.

Bitcointalk Username: Potato Chips
Utopia Public Key: 8C8F5847BD7B2FB4F32EC428B5CA8CCE1BFB26BDD2D73AE6385D2337C7AF9778
BTC Address: bc1q84ywud0fe3n8r0xja6em0rtdptatpkma575uam
Message Deep Link (Chat link): https://utopia.im/d53b4431fd604e2f0261792444797aa4?tid=3029458744120122095
Slot No: 61

That's why asking former employees likely won't provide much help.

What kind of bad reputation? sure they had negative feedbacks like every exchange but overall they were still at reputable/well-known tier.


Interesting. Care to share these bitcointalk members along with a solid proof to back your claim? they will be tagged if so.


It doesn't work that way op... there is a process.

It's likely he won't be able to provide much help.

First, he's resigned since March 2023 - from his linkedin,

Second, from my understanding, CTO's oversees the technology infrastructure side of the company so it's most likely that he has little to no clue to your questions as it's a different field.

If you've been diagnosed already or your symptoms create a great discomfort, much better to seek a professional.

Otherwise, I can vouch for blue light filter glasses + night light (feature on my PC) setup. I'm prone to eye strains whenever I stare on my monitor/tab/phone in an hour or two and this setup greatly helped me - I rarely get eye strains after this. Couple times it happend are when I was already sitting for 10 hours and above.

Similar to you, I wasn't fond of pure black dark themes like bingx. I'm not sure what happened but after a few weeks or so, I think I got used to it and did not mind it as much as before.

Nice work! Looks interesting.

But since it's basically a jade HW, I'm guessing we still have to rely on their whatnot oracle for our PIN?

I was actually one step away from buying jade until I read the device comminicates to a server for the PIN as I prefer a more closed off HW.

Bit confused. Is this from hotbit or from the exchange you first talked about?

Personally, I do not think highly of wallets who encourages and utilizes (for profits) cloud backups because it is either you don't get the weight of it or you're taking advantage of people who do not know any better.

There are a lot of bitcoin wallets out there which essentially gives us room to be picky. Therefore when it comes to reputation, I'd also consider how one does their business or should I say their ethics? especially if I wanna prevent ledger-styled surprises lol.

In short, my take is, find an alternative first for your use case. Now, if you must use this, keep the amount small.

The current sitting CEO has also confirmed this in a podcast - there's a short clip in the link:


Although he tried to downplay it by saying it's not a real concern, we all know how hostile the governments are/can be to cryptocurrencies hence you never know + this breaks the concept of self-custody.

Why should people pay to get additional risk on their way?