Bitcoin-24 scams

[Rockefoten]

Anyone has any idea why SEPA transfers from Bitcoin-24 take so damn long? Currently waiting on two transfers from them, a standard SEPA transfer initiated about a week ago and a "same day" transfer initiated on Friday. Both of them are still "processing" on the site, so it's a pretty far cry from what they promise in terms of delivery. I thought the extra cash you pay for Same Day transfer was supposed to bring the money to you faster...

I can't tell you why, but I too am waiting for the sepa withdrawal that I requested last Wednesday. Still processing...
Did a withdrawal from Bitstamp at the same time, money in my account yesterday!

[stephwen]

Anyone has any idea why SEPA transfers from Bitcoin-24 take so damn long? Currently waiting on two transfers from them, a standard SEPA transfer initiated about a week ago and a "same day" transfer initiated on Friday. Both of them are still "processing" on the site, so it's a pretty far cry from what they promise in terms of delivery. I thought the extra cash you pay for Same Day transfer was supposed to bring the money to you faster...

Same here.
Did a regular withdrawal last week, and several "same-day", and none has been processed yet. 
I'll think of switching to another exchange for futher withdrawals if it takes too long.

[philips]

This doesn't look good...did a withdrawal only few hours ago. You guys scare the shit out of me.
Have you tried contact them through email?

OTOH from what I've heard 2 weeks are not uncommon for SEPA transfers at Bitcoin-24.

[stephwen]

This doesn't look good...did a withdrawal only few hours ago. You guys scare the shit out of me.
Have you tried contact them through email?

OTOH from what I've heard 2 weeks are not uncommon for SEPA transfers at Bitcoin-24.

It it reassures you, I have already done several withdrawals in the past, and everything went fine. If I still don't have any news for my "same-day" withdrawals tomorrow, I'll contact the site admin. Although I guess he's just overwhelmed by a large amount of withdrawal requests.
But a public announcement about that would be nice.

[philips]

Thanks man.

[xchrix]

Dear User,

We have executed your withdrawal with a bank transfer to the
following bank account:

looks like they are beginning to payout... i will report when moneys on my bank account

[stephwen]

Dear User,

We have executed your withdrawal with a bank transfer to the
following bank account:

looks like they are beginning to payout... i will report when moneys on my bank account

Same here, I just received 3 e-mails regarding the 3 "same-day" withdrawals I did on the 7th and yesterday.
I'll report as soon as money arrives on my bank account, but I guess it shouldn't take long now.

[SBC]

Just so you are aware, the maximum time between a SEPA payment order being raised and the value of the order being credited to the beneficiary account is no longer than one business day - ref: http://www.gtb.db.com/content/en/858.html. In some cases same day credit transfers are available when a payment order is made before a specified time. If you're waiting longer than 1 business day (that's Monday to Friday, with payments on Friday arriving on the following Monday), you shouldn't be.

[jerkoff]

The issue is very serious. Someone used my api key and sold all my bitcoins (>500 !) in my account on the dollar market causing a flash crash. The price went down to $0.14, and the average price ended up around $18.

No sanity checks was made by the system. It happily sold everything.

You gotta love those amateur exchanges, that are programmed using programmer's logic, where if the book isn't full enough it will happily execute a sell from $250 down to $0.15 just because there are no buyers. Just ignore 60 years of exchange markets history, where real exchanges have put limits in place where if a rate drops say 10% trading is halted to get back liquidity in the market.
And besides, no sane market (although even mgtox does) presents clients with an average (weighted) price, average prices are detrimental to proper trading, only morons pay any attention to that. Only price that matters is the current price and the high/low figures, not any average.

[stephwen]

Just so you are aware, the maximum time between a SEPA payment order being raised and the value of the order being credited to the beneficiary account is no longer than one business day - ref: http://www.gtb.db.com/content/en/858.html. In some cases same day credit transfers are available when a payment order is made before a specified time. If you're waiting longer than 1 business day (that's Monday to Friday, with payments on Friday arriving on the following Monday), you shouldn't be.

That's the theory.
I have done a lot of SEPA transfers which have taken more time than that, just because some banks wait one more day to credit the beneficiary account so that they can gather interests...

[SBC]

Maybe the payment cutoff time is a factor. Certainly in the UK, under the Payment Services Regulations 2009, the banks are obliged to credit the money as soon as it arrives*. I guess interpretation of the EU regulations may vary from country to country.

Edit: *Well, the same or next business day if the payment arrives after the cutoff time.

[simplydt]

Maybe the payment cutoff time is a factor. Certainly in the UK, under the Payment Services Regulations 2009, the banks are obliged to credit the money as soon as it arrives*. I guess interpretation of the EU regulations may vary from country to country.

Edit: *Well, the same or next business day if the payment arrives after the cutoff time.

On my UK accounts payments are always instant. On my German accounts it has taken up to 3 business days. It kind of sucks.

[Joost]

From a Dutch account, I've always been able to SEPA within 48 hours to Bitcoin Central. With Bitcoin-24, however, I havn't seen anything arrive even after 6 days! Is this normal behaviour?

[tucenaber]

Hey!

Don't hijack my thread with your SEPA troubles. Start your own, if you want to discuss that.

[tucenaber]

When I asked about how the api key is generated, I got a reply:

just a random string
nothing with username or something else..

but when asking about how / when he will resolve the issue I get only silence. He said earlier that he needed to write a script to sort it out but if he cannot do that in ten days it isn't happening. I have urged him to make some public statements about the questions regarding transfers and quality of service at his exchange but he chooses to ignore that too.

Does anybody ave any information that can help explain this? (Except him being scammy)

[simplydt]

From a Dutch account, I've always been able to SEPA within 48 hours to Bitcoin Central. With Bitcoin-24, however, I havn't seen anything arrive even after 6 days! Is this normal behaviour?

I guess the transfer arrived at least 3 days ago, but I've heard bitcoin-24 is a one man band, so he may just have not gotten to it yet.

[BitAurum]

I agree that this thread should not be hijacked with SEPA processing times. Your problem consists of a guy not checking his bank account, use Sofortüberweisung if you can't wait.

I had a similar problem in February. Someone from tor bought 100 BTC over my account from the open market at shit prices. Coins were still in my account (you need an email-Confirmation to withdraw). After some discussing with the admin, he did a rollback and I had most of my money back. Still, shocking to see that he kept the problem and hoped for the best instead of either banning tor or at least examining how someone got my password. Just fyi, I am running a custom built gentoo box, so don't ask me if I upgraded my virus scanner often enough. API was and still is disabled.

My personal guess is that some once had access to the database in the past and got the (probably) MD5 hashes, did a scan against one of the many rainbow table servers and found a hit or two. Unlikely since my pass then was a 6 letter word, a number and a unicode symbol, but it might explain why he re-salted the password database (thereby fucking up everyone's records so that you had to request a new pass via email...) some weeks later.

Things often don't run smoothly there. One time the blockchain-wallet that does the payouts included a low-priority transaction in a payout-chain, thereby making the bitcoins of 30 transactions inaccessible for 24 hours. This is probably reproducible if someone sends 0.001 BTC from a slow input to 1BTC24yVKQdQNAa4vX71xLUC5A8Za7Rr71. Haven't tried it yet, but a "normal" transaction I sent there got included in a payout before it was confirmed.

One time, the address allocation was broken, fun to see 4 guys transfer funds to the same wallet you just put 30 BTC in with no response for 3 hours...

And don't even start reading the chat. Lots of fanboys praising the beauty of twitter bootstrap and the fact that, when (not if) there is a problem, the Tais is usually there to calm them down. But underneath there is a bunch of cron-jobs and php-scripts which keep it running until something breaks.

So yeah. Keep your balances in EUR when you're on btc24, and when you do trading, ask the chat if everything is running fine before touching anything.

Personally, I don't suspect malevolence behind these incidents, including yours, mostly because Simon is somewhat traceable. I have no clear answer on how he makes his money, but if I had to guess: Place an order and wonder about the one bot that modifies its orders faster than you can hit F5 and the fact that the trading volume shown in bitcoincharts is about 5-10x of what gets moved over the one (why?) payout address he has (shown above).

Nothing wrong with it. Just be sure you know that it's a 1-man operation, that he is confirmed to do a lot of trading himself and that twitter bootstrap looks nice even if the code behind it doesn't.

[tucenaber]

I had a similar problem in February. Someone from tor bought 100 BTC over my account from the open market at shit prices. Coins were still in my account (you need an email-Confirmation to withdraw). After some discussing with the admin, he did a rollback and I had most of my money back. Still, shocking to see that he kept the problem and hoped for the best instead of either banning tor or at least examining how someone got my password. Just fyi, I am running a custom built gentoo box, so don't ask me if I upgraded my virus scanner often enough. API was and still is disabled.

Thank you for that information. Now we have confirmation that the anomalies shown on the EUR graph from bitcoincharts are the exact same issue. It can safely be assumed that all 17 outliersin the beginning of february are examples of the same problem. This means it has happened in total at least to 20 people, and the administrator has been aware of the risk for over two months. That is shocking.

I really hope more of these people will chime in.

And to this day he has not said anything publicly. Now, he has all but disappeared.

My personal guess is that some once had access to the database in the past and got the (probably) MD5 hashes, did a scan against one of the many rainbow table servers and found a hit or two. Unlikely since my pass then was a 6 letter word, a number and a unicode symbol, but it might explain why he re-salted the password database (thereby fucking up everyone's records so that you had to request a new pass via email...) some weeks later.

He did re-salt the passwords, I remember that now. I have a strong 32 character password though, and I never use the same one twice. I'm not so sure it could have happened that way.

Was your bitcoins sold via the api?

Personally, I don't suspect malevolence behind these incidents, including yours, mostly because Simon is somewhat traceable. I have no clear answer on how he makes his money, but if I had to guess: Place an order and wonder about the one bot that modifies its orders faster than you can hit F5 and the fact that the trading volume shown in bitcoincharts is about 5-10x of what gets moved over the one (why?) payout address he has (shown above).

Yes, I have wondered about how that bot can be so quick...
But the trading volume is not really related to what people withdraw. Especially on a trading friendly (free) exchange like btc24. The same money can be traded over and over again.

[chip1]

Just tried checking it out and site is down....

[Amitabh S]

Can you elaborate on what exactly happened? How did someone get your API key?