Just encountered this article from The merkle site:
https://themerkle.com/bittrex-is-not-behaving-in-a-shady-manner-despite-conflciting-reports/It dates back to few days after Bittrex started running its biggest scam against thousands of users who
most of them have the following status:
-Holding enough money (>1k) in their accounts.
- Being citizen of countries that have zero or little diplomatic influence in the USA
- Being strongly verified (through 'enhanced verification' in Bittrex terms) for at least several months.
Bittrex is used to set some user's wallets to 'under maintenance' mode, occasionally, which means the victim can not use that special coin temporarily, they do this whenever market gets hot and they want
to set position against their users in the marketplace apparently.
This time they did a more aggressive job, they announced thousands of qualified accounts (plus some probably randomly chosen accounts) as
Disabled Account, blocking user's access to his/her whole coins, asking for more documents, specially a selfie while the victim holds his/her id card and a note ... with a false promise that it will be fixed within very few days ...
A lie! nothing happened after the victims desperately followed the scammer's orders, mocking themselves by taking stupid selfies again again and again. Support? Totally dead!
Meanwhile users deposits are safe in Bittrex pockets! And guess what? Users can not close their accounts because they are disabled!
A very pathetic scene: The scammer, Bittrex now has a collection of one or two thousand or even more idiots' selfies, who have been ripped off by bittrex and have sent the scammer their selfies, just right after they have been informed that the site has put its hand in their pockets, imagine their pictures: a sad, frustrated, desperate person who has lost thousands of dollars in an obvious scam and yet is taking a selfie in a gesture dictated by the perpetrator . One can argue that, Bittrex is owned by a sociopath that not only commits crimes serially but also enjoys, even more, the satisfaction of collecting pictures from the victims, specially after the crime.
Now check the dates:
1-Bittrex scam started October, 12 (as far as I know ). IMO, it is no coincidence that at the same time the crypto market was getting hot and btc has started one of its most epic rallies ever.
2- The article is dated October, 18, a week after the scam has started and affected thousands of Bittrex users in the worst way ever, practically millions of dollars has been stolen and most of the false arguments made in that article was already been strongly rejected and a lot of evidence was available to the writer to prevent him from writing such a ridiculous report and making false claims about the scam to be a normal KYC practice.
3- It is more than 16 days now, Bittrex has not released people's coins and its only public reaction is a very short and shameless rude statement pretending the scam to be nothing important, denouncing rumors, etc. Support? Dead!
I think it is a very good time to understand how immature is the crypto ecosystem:
We have scammers who deliberately perpetuate regular, planned crimes without any fears of prosecution or legal action.
Why? Because they can isolate users from each other and scam them one-by-one.
Why? Because we have corrupted/irresponsible media, like this site,
The Merkle who for (probably) a bone, publish such a biased, misleading, shameful article, washing the face of the scammers and fooling innocent readers to join more and become the next victims, eventually.
