bitcoin-24 down (is it serious trouble?)

[manfred]

Our Service is momentarily not available.
1. All funds (EUR, USD, PLN, GBP & Bitcoins) are safe.
2. All withdrawals will be gradually processed chronologically from another bank account.
3. The Polish authority closed your Bank account in Poland.
4. Our lawyers are working with high pressure on a solution.

We will back with Bitcoin-24 2.0 on when all declarations are finished.

All important Emails can be send to help@bitcoin-24.com

[SebastianJu]

Great... so even this polish bank isnt safe now anymore? This was till now the only bank thats safe for bitcoin traders. If you use normal banks in germany you have a high chance of getting your bank account closed when you are connected to a "suspicious" bank account.
I hope theres a solution...

[yucca]

I've said it before and I'll say it again:

Bitcoin-24 made the mistake of establishing an exchange without jumping through the correct regulation hoops. When my wife signed up for an ccount she did not need verivication, no utility bills, passports etc were needed to be sent, no callback etc.

In such an exchange anybody obtaining banking details belonging to someone else, through hacking or even burglary, could quickly squirt funds far and wide to other bitcoin wallets using Bitcoin-24 as the perfect interface.

So when Bitcoin-24s main bank account exceeded some threshold and started taking serious money from new users a flag was raised and regulators realised it was an exchange and not just another online business and stepped in, freezing the account.

Regulators couldn't care less about bitcoin, its the same as baseball cards in legalese, just a tradeable item. what they bother about is interfaces to the money system, adding/withdrawing cash. But once that interface has been used then the bitcoins become linked to the cash, and so all must be frozen until investigations finish.

We can only hope that the investigators are upstanding and honest in their findings and that everyone gets their BTC and Euro back.

[SebastianJu]

I've said it before and I'll say it again:

Bitcoin-24 made the mistake of establishing an exchange without jumping through the correct regulation hoops. When my wife signed up for an ccount she did not need verivication, no utility bills, passports etc were needed to be sent, no callback etc.

In such an exchange anybody obtaining banking details belonging to someone else, through hacking or even burglary, could quickly squirt funds far and wide to other bitcoin wallets using Bitcoin-24 as the perfect interface.

So when Bitcoin-24s main bank account exceeded some threshold and started taking serious money from new users a flag was raised and regulators realised it was an exchange and not just another online business and stepped in, freezing the account.

Regulators couldn't care less about bitcoin, its the same as baseball cards in legalese, just a tradeable item. what they bother about is interfaces to the money system, adding/withdrawing cash. But once that interface has been used then the bitcoins become linked to the cash, and so all must be frozen until investigations finish.

We can only hope that the investigators are upstanding and honest in their findings and that everyone gets their BTC and Euro back.

Why should the bank bother if the exchange has ids of its customers? Plus in germany, the country where bitcoin-24.com is from, its not allowed to demand an id as far as i read.
And isnt it the case that you can withdraw up to 1000€ every week from mtgox without having to verify who you are? I havent checked this because i verified myself with mtgox, i only have read this here in the forum yesterday.
So i dont see why the banks should bother if the exchange has documents. It might be happen that mtgox gets similar problems in the near future because they use the same, up to now, safe bank. At least for europe.

[yucca]

When I signed up for MtGox before I could make a transfer from my EUR bank to the MtGox polish bank I had to get verified, sending copies of  passport, utility bill with same address of bank account I would be using to add funds. I cannot use any other named account to add funds, this meets anti-laundering regulations.

My wife signed up for bitcoin-24 and she did none of this, just registered with an email address and then transfered euro the same day, so had someone gained access to my wifes banking details they could also have converted her money into BTC and then laundered through the blockchain no problems.

So I suspect someone complained to the bank about bitcoin-24 being fraudulent, because the bitcoin-24 exchange engine broke and short changed them. the bank then froze the account. if bitcoin-24 reopens in version 2 I can guarantee you they will require verification if you want to add funds via bank.

[moni3z]

If too many fraud transfers happen the account is dropped by the bank for high risk. Some of them dont like doing sepa either because they dont make enough profit, and if you are doing a hundred per day you get dropped.

Banks will also start harassing you and freezing transfers to prove where the income is from to prevent laundering. You get around this by getting Poland lawyer to set up a corporate account andd explain what is going on. I bet he was using a personal account or something stupid.

According to reddit posts he claims they will be back online soon but on a german btc trading forum they already declared scam and went after him in meatspace to check his old addresses. Lol germans dont screw around

[SebastianJu]

I wrote not a few mails with Simon. He is a fair guy in my opinion. So i dont see that he goes scammy.

What i dont fully understand that the problems with the exchange wasnt fixed. Sometimes you had more BTC or less in your account than you should because some calc error happened. Simon had to correct this. He wanted to recode it all but what i heard these errors still happened.

The bad thing about this is that we know that all the other banks behave like this. Closing accounts and so on. But this bank till now was the only safe haven. I wonder what can be done now if someone wants to trade bitcoins. But maybe its really a special case.

At the end... real money laundering cant be undone so easily. And if you use bank accounts in other countries. Higher costs maybe but at least working.

[realme]

TAiS46 5 points 2 hours ago

All money send to the BZWBK (Poland) bank account and which are still send to this account, can not be stopped. The Bank account in Poland is noch closed, it is just blocked! So all arriving payments will not send automatically back.

The Comerzbank (German bank account) is closed in 2 Month. We are not able, to send funds anymore from this bank account, because we had a very low limit on this bank account and I can't get money out of it. My lawyer is in contact with the bank on monday.

First of all, we must find the reason for all this, what happen. All we know is, that the German government asked for help from the Poland government, to close the Bank account in Poland. Some people are asking now: Why is not the Commerzbank still closed? The reason is, that it is not so easy in Germany to close an bank account within some minutes like it is in poland.

WHY does the German government closed our bank accounts and WHY do they give us no information, before they are doing this? WHY must we hear from the Polish government, what happening atm?

    1 Lawyer, 1 from the Government and 2 students in Poland are helping us to get the Polish Bank account back. I am sure, that we will get the bank account back, maybe also this week! So we are able to do all payouts which are open.
    Asking the Commerzbank for more information, why they also closed our bank account, wich reason did they have to do this?
    Our lawyer is trying to get the Commerzbank account back, because there is no reason, to close our bank account.
    Setting up the trading engine again

More informations tomorrow, after my lawyer gives me a feedback if it is safe to publish that, what I am writing. It is not easy atm for me to give a statement, before it was double checked.
http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1c7utl/bitcoin24com_the_polish_authority_closed_your_our/c9evqfb

It seems to be a big problem for Simon to make his businesses legal!
In Germany you can't do financial service (businesses ) without  authorisation from Bafin (Federal Financial Supervisory Authority) http://www.bafin.de/EN/Homepage/homepage_node.html

I doubt that Simon will solve the legal issues quick! Simon seems to be a good guy, but he is also very young and naive (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=98434.0) in that kind of businesses and laws!

[Amitabh S]

According to reddit posts he claims they will be back online soon but on a german btc trading forum they already declared scam and went after him in meatspace to check his old addresses. Lol germans dont screw around

Linkz?

[shitaifan2013]

According to reddit posts he claims they will be back online soon but on a german btc trading forum they already declared scam and went after him in meatspace to check his old addresses. Lol germans dont screw around

Linkz?

voila! https://forum.bitcoin.de/boersen-handelsplaetze/632-ist-mit-bitcoin-24-los-4.html