Hi,
TL;DR: Bitcoin trading platform QUOINE claimed that I exploited a glitch in their system, blocked my withdrawal requests, and reset my account balance from US$370,000 to zero without notice.
I bought my first bitcoins via a trading platform known as QUOINE last month. From what I can gather, QUOINE is a bitcoin trading platform based in Singapore and has been a locally registered company (Reg #201414068E) since 2014.
I was introduced to QUOINE and its zero trading fee campaign by a friend of mine. After some research on QUOINE, I believed that they were a trustworthy entity and decided to sign up for an account with them on June 14, 2016. I submitted legal identification documents for account verification and my account was then approved on June 16. On June 18, I transferred SGD from my bank account to QUOINE for the purpose of conducting trading via bitcoins.
On June 20, I wrote a software application that interacts with QUOINE's application programming interface (API) that is available to all users of their trading platform to conduct trading between currency pairs available on their platform.
The basic, functional application that I wrote is capable of conducting trades without any manual input and began trading right after it was completed. I did a test withdrawal of S$500 on the same day and the funds had reached my bank after two days. Through the use of my application, I executed a series of trades that made me profits, all of which were kept in QUOINE.
On June 21, I submitted two withdrawal requests, one at S$19.9K using FAST which takes one business day to complete and the other at S$200K via bank wire which, according to QUOINE, requires three business days. I was contacted by their support staff on June 22 to confirm that the larger withdrawal cannot be performed using FAST as it can only be used for transfers under S$50K and I had told them to proceed with the withdrawals as such (screenshot below). The respective amounts were deducted from my QUOINE account and while the funds from the smaller withdrawal had been deposited in my bank account within the next day, the
funds from the larger withdrawal request never arrived.
On June 27, I sent in a support request asking for the status of my pending withdrawal after sending in additional withdrawal requests on June 23 but the
support requests went unanswered.
Then on June 29, QUOINE sent me a notification stating that "a price anomaly due to a system glitch allowed continuous arbitrage across various products in the platform", and my account had been flagged out for "having done trades to take advantage of this glitch in violation of our terms & policies and as a result [my] trades during those dates will be reverted." (screenshot below)
I certainly am not aware of any glitch that they claim to be existing in their trading platform, and definitely have not exploited any. The software application I have written was constantly performing trades on QUOINE's platform whenever possible based on the logic that I have implemented and was solely submitting market orders via QUOINE's API. I'm unable to retrieve a history of the market orders submitted during that period from their API as it appears that QUOINE have made it unavailable, but I did maintain a log of my account balance while the application conducted trading.
The first thing I did after receiving their notification on June 29 was to verify whether I did violate their terms and conditions. I visited their Terms and Conditions (T&C) page on their website and a new clause has been added that states that "Arbitrage trading or the ability to extract profits by exploiting pricing differences across different but related products on QUOINE is strictly prohibited". The Terms and Conditions page showed that the page was "Last updated April 2014" but I counter-checked this page against Google's web cache as well as Archive.org and discovered that the new clause did not exist in their T&C page previously, and in particular, prior to the time when I registered my account with QUOINE on June 14 (links to cached page below).
On July 2, I prepared and sent them a letter of demand for a full withdrawal of my account balances via email, and have stated clearly that I expect a response by July 9. Up till now, I have yet to receive a single response from them for both my support requests and demand letter since two weeks ago.
Just recently, I logged in to my QUOINE account and discovered that my SGD account balance has been reset to zero while my other currency balances are set to a negative value. This was done without any notification from QUOINE. I believe that this is not an act of fairness, and I would like to seek advice from various online communities in regards to this matter, particularly from individuals who have been through a similar situation, as I'm uncertain on what would be the best course of action to take from here.
Has anyone here faced such an issue before? If so, I would appreciate your advice on how to proceed on this. Please feel free to write an email to me by sending it to alexbtctrader (at gmail) and I'll respond to all relevant emails and replies as soon as possible. I thank you for taking the time to read my detailed request above.
Screenshots are available on Imgur:
http://imgur.com/a/z7RbJT&C page as captured by Archive.org, April 6, 2016:
https://web.archive.org/web/20160406114916/https://www.quoine.com/terms/T&C page as captured by Google, June 17, 2016:
https://archive.is/u9CelT&C page as captured by Archive.is, June 29, 2016:
https://archive.is/hgwxST&C page as captured by Archive.org, July 10, 2016:
https://web.archive.org/web/20160710152412/https://www.quoine.com/terms/Regards,
Alex
