Missing Bitcoins (EXTREMELY FRUSTRATING)

[jjmangum13]

So I sent this message to support: "So I chose the bitcoin to email option and everything worked out perfectly until I opened the message from coinapult for my bitcoins I accidently sent my bitcoins to my order id which is xxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxx it now says I have 0 bitcoins. What should I do?"

I received this message a day later: "I'm going to have to forward this over to tech support. This may take some time to figure out.

Thanks, Seth"


Its been 8 days since then, ive contacted bitinstant multiple times.... no response yet. What should I do? I take it my bitcoins are gone? 90$ of bitcoins and this support? Ridiculous. Im extremely frustrated. Any suggestions? Thanks. -JJ

[Larynth]

so what you are saying is that you sent the bitcoins to an address that you pasted your order number into. In that case they are likely irretrievable.

[DontCallMeShirley]

Support for most btc related sites have probably been slammed lately.  I would not think that an order id would work as a receiving address for btc so I dunno wtf happened.  Maybe you just learned a $90 lesson.  Always double/triple check your address as btc transactions are irreversible.

[SgtSpike]

so what you are saying is that you sent the bitcoins to an address that you pasted your order number into. In that case they are likely irretrievable.

Not at all.  You can't send Bitcoins to an address in format xxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxx - it would error out.  "-" is not a valid address character, and there's a checksum built in to Bitcoin addresses as well, to make sure you don't accidentally send them to the wrong place.

That said, BitInstant is bad at support from what I've heard.  Keep bothering them, hopefully they'll get back to you and figure out what happened.

[Crenel84]

I don't know what support could do about it if you sent your funds to the wrong address. From what I understand, if it was a valid address (not the correct one, just a valid one), any given site's support is not going to be able to undo that transaction.

As for dashes not being a valid character, it's common for long strings -- like credit card numbers -- to be entered with dashes or spaces and those are then stripped out before use.

[SgtSpike]

I don't know what support could do about it if you sent your funds to the wrong address. From what I understand, if it was a valid address (not the correct one, just a valid one), any given site's support is not going to be able to undo that transaction.

As for dashes not being a valid character, it's common for long strings -- like credit card numbers -- to be entered with dashes or spaces and those are then stripped out before use.

Fair point about the stripping, but the checksum is 4 bytes long (~4-5 chars in base 58?), and a valid Bitcoin address also has to start with a 1 and be the correct length.  The likelihood that his random string of numbers and digits met all of that criteria is extremely small.