Do NOT trust payments with https://www.coinpayments.net/

[Bestcoin-fan]

Recently I was deceived with a FRAUD SCAM shop https://bostonbtcminers.us/
I paid and lost 0.37 BTC there, this is a real disaster for me as I live in a poor totalitarian country.
I made my payment to that scam shop with the https://www.coinpayments.net/ payment processor.
I tried to ask for refund from coinpayments.net, NO money was refunded.
I'd just like to warn everyone NOT to consider crypto payments as reliable or protected in a way with that payment gate

Here's an abstract from my conversation with the coinpayments.net support desk:

Coinpayments.net Support

..I'm sorry to hear of this trouble, but the bitcoin network is designed to make chargebacks impossible. Coinpayments never has access or control of a user's bitcoins in any way, which means only the end user has 100% control over his own bitcoins. This means we have no power to stop or reverse a transaction for you.

Me:

Dear Mr Data (this is how he introduced himself to me),
I know and fully understand what you say.
I just cannot see ANY SLIGHTEST sense in your being as an intermediary payment processor between sellers and buyers. With the same "success" one could just pay (after intense praying) directly on any seller's website. The meaning of any payment gate (processor) is to provide a kind of PROTECTION against fraud to both buyers and sellers. You provide NO protection at all!!!
The problem is NOT the crypto payments are irreversible! The problem is YOU have done nothing to be a honest reliable intermediary by, for example, holding payments in YOUR OWN temporary wallets for SOME time after deals EXACTLY to be able to resolve such disputes!!

Coinpayments.net Support

You are thinking of an escrow service, not a payment processor. If you want to operate that way you would want to contact sellers beforehand and ask them to use our sister site SetEscrow.com for your transaction instead of a regular CoinPayments payment. Our purpose as an intermediary is to provide an easy to integrate payment system for merchants without them having to run coin daemons on their own insecure and/or more expensive servers or develop custom solutions for themselves. We also provide the feedback system to help buyer's gauge the honesty of the seller.

Me:

A regular buyer cannot, and has not to, understand such nuances!
And what "running coin daemons" are you saying about??
ALL a seller has to do is just provide his bitcoin address ONLY!!! He doesn't have to run any "daemons"!!!
Just go to site http://www.bitcoinqrcode.org/ or any similar one , and generate a picture from his address and place it in his shop near the address itself.
NO daemons or wallets needed!!! A seller can create  just a watching wallet to monitor his addresses and users' payments

So, do NEVER consider crypto payments as trusted or more reliable, or protected in a way (like I was thinking), if a shop suggests crypto payments with a gate like that worthless useless https://www.coinpayments.net/

[1713525821]

1713525821

[exstasie]

Recently I was deceived with a FRAUD SCAM shop https://bostonbtcminers.us/
I paid and lost 0.37 BTC there, this is a real disaster for me as I live in a poor totalitarian country.
I made my payment to that scam shop with the https://www.coinpayments.net/ payment processor.
I tried to ask for refund from coinpayments.net, NO money was refunded.
I'd just like to warn everyone NOT to consider crypto payments as reliable or protected in a way with that payment gate

That sucks -- I'm really sorry to hear that. Here's the thing, though. Your real issue is with the scammer, not the payment processors. Now, I think that if coinpayments.net receives multiple complaints about fraud from one of their merchants, that they should stop doing business with them.

But at the end of the day, you sent your coins directly to a scammer. coinpayments.net, as I understand, does not offer custodial services. They don't hold the coins. They offer hosting services (where the scammer's wallets are held, but he would have extracted the private keys already) and checkout/cart solutions.

So there is no way they could have helped you here.

[hello_good_sir]

Coinpayments does not offer chargebacks, they are not an escrow service.

I'm extremely sorry for your loss and i feel your pain mate. But coinpayments isn't really the one at fault here, they allow anyone to use their API to accept payments and they simply provide a framework for businesses to accept bitcoin on, nothing else.

Do your research and your own due diligence before you use any site to buy stuff, especially if you are sending first to the site. Remember that all bitcoin transactions are irreversible - they cannot be charged back. If you are sending btc, then remember that, unless you are using escrow.

[Bestcoin-fan]

Recently I was deceived with a FRAUD SCAM shop https://bostonbtcminers.us/
I paid and lost 0.37 BTC there, this is a real disaster for me as I live in a poor totalitarian country.
I made my payment to that scam shop with the https://www.coinpayments.net/ payment processor.
I tried to ask for refund from coinpayments.net, NO money was refunded.
I'd just like to warn everyone NOT to consider crypto payments as reliable or protected in a way with that payment gate

That sucks -- I'm really sorry to hear that. Here's the thing, though. Your real issue is with the scammer, not the payment processors. Now, I think that if coinpayments.net receives multiple complaints about fraud from one of their merchants, that they should stop doing business with them.

But at the end of the day, you sent your coins directly to a scammer. coinpayments.net, as I understand, does not offer custodial services. They don't hold the coins. They offer hosting services (where the scammer's wallets are held, but he would have extracted the private keys already) and checkout/cart solutions.

So there is no way they could have helped you here.

I totally disagree with you, man.
The scammer site's Comodo security sertificate was issued just recently (on September 2d 2017), there was just no chance to accumulate much feedbacks maybe.
And the payment processor just misleads customers! Just reread carefully what I wrote above

[Bestcoin-fan]

Coinpayments does not offer chargebacks, they are not an escrow service.

I'm extremely sorry for your loss and i feel your pain mate. But coinpayments isn't really the one at fault here, they allow anyone to use their API to accept payments and they simply provide a framework for businesses to accept bitcoin on, nothing else.

Do your research and your own due diligence before you use any site to buy stuff, especially if you are sending first to the site. Remember that all bitcoin transactions are irreversible - they cannot be charged back. If you are sending btc, then remember that, unless you are using escrow.

Guys, I am absolutely sure a huge part of the blame lies on the payment processor here too!!
It misleads people providing an ILLUSION of protection as customers seem they do pay to a third party, not directly to unknown scammer

[MrData]

Yes, that seller received 2 scam complaints today and their account and domain were banned from CoinPayments.net.

[exstasie]

Recently I was deceived with a FRAUD SCAM shop https://bostonbtcminers.us/
I paid and lost 0.37 BTC there, this is a real disaster for me as I live in a poor totalitarian country.
I made my payment to that scam shop with the https://www.coinpayments.net/ payment processor.
I tried to ask for refund from coinpayments.net, NO money was refunded.
I'd just like to warn everyone NOT to consider crypto payments as reliable or protected in a way with that payment gate

That sucks -- I'm really sorry to hear that. Here's the thing, though. Your real issue is with the scammer, not the payment processors. Now, I think that if coinpayments.net receives multiple complaints about fraud from one of their merchants, that they should stop doing business with them.

But at the end of the day, you sent your coins directly to a scammer. coinpayments.net, as I understand, does not offer custodial services. They don't hold the coins. They offer hosting services (where the scammer's wallets are held, but he would have extracted the private keys already) and checkout/cart solutions.

So there is no way they could have helped you here.

I totally disagree with you, man.
The scammer site's Comodo security sertificate was issued just recently (on September 2d 2017), there was just no chance to accumulate much feedbacks maybe.
And the payment processor just misleads customers! Just reread carefully what I wrote above

Indeed, you may have been one of the first people scammed by the fraudulent mining hardware site. Again, I'm really sorry this happened. I can sympathize; I recently suffered crippling losses by keeping coins on a third party service that went offline.

Yes, that seller received 2 scam complaints today and their account and domain were banned from CoinPayments.net.

This is what I expected to see from the payment processor. It sucks to see people scammed, but this is about all that can be expected. They are a very small company aimed at smaller vendors and altcoins (as opposed to Bitpay/Coinbase), so they have less means and ability to root out frauds before the fact. This is about as good as it gets.

[Bestcoin-fan]

Unlike credit cards that do always require for shops to use a third party payment processor, there is nothing that prevents online shops from taking money (cryptos) DIRECTLY from buyers!

Shops do NOT need any payments gate here at all! (see how-to above if you need)

So, when a buyer is seeing that a crypto payment is received through a third party crypto payment processor like that https://www.coinpayments.net/  the buyer is involuntary thinking that the third party payment gate guarantees him a PROTECTION against fraud in a way!

And here https://www.coinpayments.net/  by NO means does that!

While it definitely could!
It would just have had to accept buyer's money into its own temporary wallet (for example) for a period of time, or just block withdrawals of cryptos for merchants for a time, or in any other way, but it MUST have protected buyer's money in a way!

Otherwise, why is it needed at all???

[squatter]

It would just have had to accept buyer's money into its own temporary wallet (for example) for a period of time, or just block withdrawals of cryptos for merchants for a time, or in any other way, but it MUST have protected buyer's money in a way!

Otherwise, why is it needed at all???

The main reason that a merchant may use their service is if they do not have the technical knowledge to secure their wallet environment and properly implement an exchange rate for cryptocurrencies. They allow you to accept a bunch of different coins without securing all the wallets on your dedicated servers. That's attractive, since downloading and properly maintaining various wallets in a secure environment is one of the main deterrents to accepting smaller altcoins (e.g. because of malware concerns).

There are escrow services (even right here on this forum) if that's what you want. Basically what happened here is that you sent a payment directly to the scammer. Coinpayments doesn't actually control the keys here.

[Bestcoin-fan]

...  Basically what happened here is that you sent a payment directly to the scammer. Coinpayments doesn't actually control the keys here.

Basically if I had not been misleaded by the coinpayments.net payment gate (and as an ordinary person I had the right to think that the participation of a third party is primarily necessary to protect the transaction from fraud and not just for technical convenience of shop's employees) I would have never bought anything directly from those damn scammers

[MAbtc]

...  Basically what happened here is that you sent a payment directly to the scammer. Coinpayments doesn't actually control the keys here.

Basically if I had not been misleaded by the coinpayments.net payment gate (and as an ordinary person I had the right to think that the participation of a third party is primarily necessary to protect the transaction from fraud and not just for technical convenience of shop's employees) I would have never bought anything directly from those damn scammers

I hear that. But personally I'd have never gotten involved with such a scammy sounding site. Even if the deal were escrowed, you're bound to experience some hassle at least. When it comes to mining hardware, you should deal directly with the manufacturer. The chances of being scammed are very high.

I don't think Bitpay or Coinbase offers any protection in this context, either. They do refunds, but only as coordinated with vendors. If you get scammed by a vendor, I think all you can do is file a police report...

[puwaha]

...  Basically what happened here is that you sent a payment directly to the scammer. Coinpayments doesn't actually control the keys here.

Basically if I had not been misleaded by the coinpayments.net payment gate (and as an ordinary person I had the right to think that the participation of a third party is primarily necessary to protect the transaction from fraud and not just for technical convenience of shop's employees) I would have never bought anything directly from those damn scammers

Ignorance of what coinpayments does does not make them complicit.  They are just the middle man.  It's like blaming the ATM when if you were mugged on the street.

[Bestcoin-fan]

...When it comes to mining hardware, you should deal directly with the manufacturer. The chances of being scammed are very high.

I would have done that with great pleasure!! Of course I did try to buy at the manufacturer's site first!! The problem is their site is ALWAYS UNAVAILABLE when real sales are open!!

[BitsofTwits]

...  Basically what happened here is that you sent a payment directly to the scammer. Coinpayments doesn't actually control the keys here.

Basically if I had not been misleaded by the coinpayments.net payment gate (and as an ordinary person I had the right to think that the participation of a third party is primarily necessary to protect the transaction from fraud and not just for technical convenience of shop's employees) I would have never bought anything directly from those damn scammers

Ignorance of what coinpayments does does not make them complicit.  They are just the middle man.  It's like blaming the ATM when if you were mugged on the street.

Completely agree. This is crypto and CoinPayments is not responsible for where and how you send your money. It's the same as if I put up a bitcoin address, say I'm selling miners at half the going rate and you send it. Its a decentralized market and you are responsible for your own actions.

CoinPayments has always been one of the good guys. They do their best to provide a payment gateway which services a decentralized industry. This is the beauty and the downfall of cryptocurrencies. You, as a user of the system, must protect yourself and be wary of all interactions in this space.


I came across this on their support page which pretty much sums things up:

https://coinpay.freshdesk.com/support/solutions/articles/1000181459-scam-warning

Make sure to check merchant's feedback before purchasing, do research on the store for reviews on social media and other places, even try contacting the merchant beforehand. General rule, If someone is selling something that sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Make sure to use the feedback feature to help rate the merchants accordingly. Always stay vigilant when shopping online! Please be careful, completed transaction funds can't be reversed. If you still wish to purchase from a merchant you do not know, please do not buy the most expensive thing in their store, start with something you can afford to lose if it does not work out. We can't prevent all scams, but with enough people making educated decisions, we can deter scammers together.