What was the problem? Summarize clearly please.
Goodcall.
5 days ago I decided to buy BTC through Bitinstant. I made an initial transaction which cleared in an hour. I followed up with an identical transaction two hours later. This second transaction processed through Bitinstant, but was never paid. I received a confirmation email that told me I was paid, and I viewed an order status page that said the same thing, but Bitinstant had not paid me.
I contacted customer support. First through their livechat, where I recieved no response(first few hours). Then through their email, where I recieved no response(24 hours). Then through their emergency phoneline(48 hours), where I again, received no response. Finally, I arrived on bitcointalk where the user Yankee, also known as Charlie from Bitinstant, responded to my post in his thread. This response led to a private message where I got Charlie's email, and a followup emails were replied to once every 24 hrs (which is slow).
It would seem that the result of emailing Charlie was that my query was pushed through to another fellow named Ira, who then got my order back into the lineup. Its entirely possible that emailing Charlie had no effect on my order though, and that processing was actually this incredibly slow.
So, five days after starting my transaction with the Bit-notsoinstant, I finally received my coins. I wasn't given any kind of fee slack, but Bitinstant did honor the price of coins from the day I paid, and that's a significant detail for me since coin prices keep rising.
The explanation for this debacle is that my transaction processed as fraudulent because it was identical to my first transaction which I posted two hours earlier. This doesn't seem to make sense to me, and I don't see any evidence that MoneyGram or ZipZap heldup the processing due to fraud concerns.
So, you want a clear summary and the details are mostly all here. Its hard to say exactly what happened.
If you trust Bitinstant then you'll take their explanation.
I'm still a bit skeptical though. I see a number of other users having similar problems this weekend, and there is no reason that two identical transaction would result in a red-flag for fraudulent activity.
I may get in contact with ZipZap and Moneygram to verify that their companies did not claim fraud, and I may stay on the line wit Bitinstant and prod them about this error some more. If so, I'll update here. In the meantime, I think that Bitinstant is a viable method for getting coins, just expect that you may be right where I am now.
Oh and on a positive note, if you're reading this because you're worried you've been robbed. I encourage you to go through the bullshit support and to not panic. Expect that this could take much longer than you planned for but expect that you will get paid.
