Possibly scammed, need tech advice please :)

[TSpinDouble]

Edit: SOLVED! I've used CPFP (child pays for parent) to spend the unspent coins back into my wallet after paying a "high" fee of approx $7 on a $4k transaction.
The txid is here and shows a confirmation and I can spend that balance so I appear to be all set! Feel free to see what was up though.

Hi bitcointalk! I was recommended to come here when I had an issue on my hand.

I am a professional poker player and ventured deep into the abyss of shady/dodgy sites. Why I did so is still a mystery to me. Long story short, I finally made two withdrawals totaling approximately $3,500 to $4,000 via BTC. Next day, I load up my Ledger and see I have my balance. Awesome!

Oh wait...it's not spendable.
Surely it just hasn't confirmed yet, right? No big deal.

Then I look at the transactions...

https://blockstream.info/tx/35c1ff29f22c251b67829ce6046a7441aa81dd67d1b6b3fffb3c518fa7a19b2b

and

https://blockstream.info/tx/e65394e7a7c8fce0eeabef3709368ad032bee7a531fed6ac002823c4ad697970

Previous withdrawals were sent to me with a more normalized fee structure.
These were sent with what looks like a near-zero fee.

With my limited technical understanding of BTC, this means the transaction will either get stuck for a VERY long time, or it will never confirm and eventually be returned to him.
This person has blocked me on socials and has said on the discord server for the site that "the site is better off without him"

(Basically as a good professional player he didn't want me beating his small community of players)

I'm ok with this as long as I don't get scammed.

Is there anything I can do at this point?

[Melloiga]

The first one was sent with a very low fee and the second one has 0 fee but I just checked on blockcypher and it reports no double spend. So, with my limited knowledge I can say that they still might go through. Use this site: https://bitaccelerate.com/ It is a free transaction acceleration service and it might help to get your transaction get accepted in a block.

There are paid version of this service available on the forum and on other websites but I haven't used any of those services, so I can't say whether paying for it works or not. I usually use RBF when making transaction and if the transaction gets stuck, I just hike the fees. But the free bitcoin transaction accelerator I mentioned above. I did used it once when I was low on coins and it got the transaction accepted within next 3 blocks. So, good luck.

If that didn't work. Try the paid bitcoin transaction accelerator services. And see if that works. Since, it is a big amount, you can afford to pay a little, I would think.

This is the one I know of on the forum: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5034315.0

[odolvlobo]

The transactions are still unconfirmed because the fees are very low compared to the other transactions waiting to be confirmed.

You can potentially expedite the  transactions by sending the unconfirmed bitcoins to yourself with a fee that is high enough to be confirmed quickly. This is called CPFP (Child Pays For Parent).

[TSpinDouble]

The transactions are still unconfirmed because the fees are very low compared to the other transactions waiting to be confirmed.

You can potentially expedite the  transactions by sending the unconfirmed bitcoins to yourself with a fee that is high enough to be confirmed quickly. This is called CPFP (Child Pays For Parent).

I'm working with someone right now who's showing me how to set up this very thing using Electrum and my Ledger. If this works I'll come back and confirm that it does.
Thanks!

[odolvlobo]

The transactions are still unconfirmed because the fees are very low compared to the other transactions waiting to be confirmed.

You can potentially expedite the  transactions by sending the unconfirmed bitcoins to yourself with a fee that is high enough to be confirmed quickly. This is called CPFP (Child Pays For Parent).

I'm working with someone right now who's showing me how to set up this very thing using Electrum and my Ledger. If this works I'll come back and confirm that it does.
Thanks!

Furthermore, the transactions that you are waiting for are themselves waiting on a long chain of low-fee transactions to be confirmed. You should consider paying a relatively high fee for the CPFP transaction if you want to ever receive the bitcoins.

[nc50lc]

You can potentially expedite the  transactions by sending the unconfirmed bitcoins to yourself with a fee that is high enough to be confirmed quickly. This is called CPFP (Child Pays For Parent).

I'm working with someone right now who's showing me how to set up this very thing using Electrum and my Ledger. If this works I'll come back and confirm that it does.
Thanks!

You're in the same situation as this guy: Re: Bitcoin transaction pending for quite long,
it would take a very high transaction fee to CPFP it to 1mb-from-tip since there are 8 more parent transactions that are all unconfirmed with the same fee rate and vSize.
but at least you can bump that unconfirmed transaction group closer to the tip of the nodes' mempools.

Example: All 8 unconfirmed parent transactions (including your 2nd transaction) are all 166vBtes with 1699sat fee (10sat/vB).
If you CPFP with 100sat/byte and that transaction have 166 vBytes size (average).
The tx group will only have an effective fee rate of 20sat/vByte [30,192/1494=20], not enough for fast transaction at this moment.

That site must have been spending the unconfirmed change of the other clients' withdrawals creating a chain of unconfirmed transactions.
It's based from this: Your withdrawal transaction's input is the change of your other withdrawal transaction.
And if you perform CPFP to the first transaction in the OP (35c1ff29f.....), it will affect the second transaction.

[TSpinDouble]

I'm not familiar with forums, but if any staff want to close the thread they may!

I've done what appears to be successful CPFP (Child pays for parent) on the transaction.
The txid is 6d65c98ea01bad8d98045794729b7d1b93936a11faad0e3bd126e9223d2ee297

Since it's been confirmed, in my other ledger wallet, and fully spendable, I appear to be completely in the clear.

I believe his intentions were as follows:

"Send a transaction that very well could fail. Should it not fail...oh well. Should it fail...lmao get fucked"

I will edit the post as well.

[nc50lc]

I'm not familiar with forums, but if any staff want to close the thread they may!
-snip-

There should be a "lock topic" button at the bottom-left side of the page to close this thread.

I've done what appears to be successful CPFP (Child pays for parent) on the transaction.
The txid is 6d65c98ea01bad8d98045794729b7d1b93936a11faad0e3bd126e9223d2ee297

yeah, that did it, that's quite a transaction fee though.