Weird Instawallet Behaviour

[edgar08]

Hi all,

Nice to be on this forum. Today I sent some coins to an instawallet address, and after 25+ confirmations it's not showing up. Then I also sent a second transaction of a small amount of bitcoins to check again, still no btc on instawallet (blockchain.info says otherwise for the address). Then I see a transaction coming FROM the instawallet address later in the day (with coins never being present in instawallet, so funds were not transferred using their web interface) bunched up with coins coming from other addresses, all done by the same entity. The transaction seems to be taking the exact amount of the last deposit in every sending address, but the transaction is still unconfirmed, despite being quite old.

http://blockchain.info/tx/2f91df431287627f02c782b4422f09d856b03546cd7772213a5084dcdfe704c5

So two things, is instawallet being hacked/dishonest/technical glitch (old blockchain)? And is that transaction likely fraudulent (i.e. won't be confirmed)?

Thanks for your wisdom!

[1714862483]

1714862483

[1714862483]

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[arlekyn13]

Also sent some coins to my instawallet, they do not show on the website, but the transaction is already confirmed (12 confirmations at this time). Emailed support, waiting on a resolution now.

[arlekyn13]

Update:
The bitcoins arrived to my instawallet address. I've also received a reply to my email sent to their support explaining why it was slow and it also contains an answer to the thread starter issue. I take the liberty to post the answer here:
"Last night the Bitcoin client crashed unexpectedly, it was quickly restarted by our monitoring infrastructure.
However, Instawallet's Bitcoin database being quite large it always takes some time for the Bitcoin client to be completely operational.

As a consequence, and during the Bitcoin client startup time, incoming transactions did not show up in wallets as they should have.

Missing transactions have been restored to the affected wallets.

If you have checked your transactions against a Blockchain monitoring tool you might have noticed that coins were leaving the address you sent them to making it look like someone was spending from your wallet. This is perfectly normal, it is the way Instawallet works. It will try as much as possible to protect your privacy by sending out random coins from its pool instead of the original coins that were used to fund a particular wallet."

[JokersJoke]

Same thing has happened to me except its been almost 2 days and no sign of the bitcoins. My receiving BTC address for my instawallet has changed but the wallet is the same URL and still no sign of them.

Checked blockchain.info and it showed the deposits i made to the initial BTC address for the wallet and has over 200+ confirmations.
As you have said before the coins appear to have been bunched together with a load of other coins from other addresses.

Instawallet went down yesterday and I've emailed support to try and see what happened to my BTC. Hopefully they are not lost but after this experience doubt I'll be using Instawallet again.

How long did support take to respond to your email? Also what info did you send them?

Thanks in advance

[polrpaul]

Some users were reporting similar issues on #bitcoin-otc earlier today, and the site owner personally resolved.

[davout]

You'll find a complete run-down of what is happening here, also if you sent an e-mail to the support you should have gotten a response by now.

[JokersJoke]

Apologies, support were great I was accessing the wrong URL but honestly the I and l look very similar