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[Melbustus]

A little quick to be calling scam... As noted in the other thread (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=83209.msg2617075#msg2617075), I'm sure they'll resolve your issue. Not cool that your order was messed-up/delayed, but BitInstant is hardly a scam; I've been using them for years (I don't often get to use that timescale in the bitcoin world :-) ).

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[Rawted]

I had something similar happen in february. I ordered 20 btc from them and zipzap had errors. Bitinstant strung me along until may when they decided to give me 3.3 btc (the then rate for the amount i paid in feb...). Although the guy who finally responded to me was nice enough, it doesnt make up for the months of no communication and 17 less btc i received. Use caution.

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[crazylikeafox]

Customer service has been amazing today.

Does that mean they "found" your money?  Bitinstant has gone radio silent in their actual support thread and fired/laid off their customer service reps that were interacting with people on there.  There are also alot of complaints floating around.  It's a Ponzi scheme and it appears that it is (finally) on the verge of collapse.  My guess is they hurriedly rolled out the new site in hopes that the Winklevoss twins would give them more investment money (beyond the $1.5 million they have already sunk into it) to cover the massive hole in their books, and they were turned down.  Given that they couldn't even pay their customer service reps, imagine the odds against them being able to buy any Bitcoins and deliver them.

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[crazylikeafox]

Well it can't be a ponzi scheme, you don't keep money in it.

It can be a ponzi scheme if they are using money from new orders to fund old orders, which is exactly what has been going on with them for several months now.

They say zipzap doesn't have a backend and they had to find a developer to do the api call.

That is laughable nonsense.  For starters, I have a ZipZap merchant account, and they do have a back end (the back end is hosted on CashPayment.com).  Second, they may choose to do refunds via API call, but if they do, one would think that given the 409 pages of complaints in their support thread, they would have done these refunds before and have already had the code written for making them.  

Yet another lie they have been caught in trying to buy time to get more orders in to pay for old orders.

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[crazylikeafox]

But again, a ponzi doesn't make sense because they don't pay extra. They pay less after fees.
Ponzis pay crazy interest.

The primary characteristic of a ponzi scheme is that they are "borrowing from Peter to pay Paul".  That is what they are doing, and they are doing it to cover a massive hole in their books.  They are misrepresenting that they have the money to be able to process new orders, when in fact they are just taking money from new orders and allocating it to old orders.  That means somewhere along the line, somebody made off with a huge amount of customer money, or the business was mismanaged and they lost customer money (which is supposed to be clearly segregated from business operating capital - this kind of thing isn't supposed to happen).  Either way, it's a fraudulent scheme that will only be able to continue as long as a new stream of customers keeps coming.

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[crazylikeafox]

Yes but why would they have a hole when they payout LESS than they take in?

Because at some point somebody took a huge amount of customer money for personal use out of the company, or they managed the business poorly and lost large amounts of customer money.  Either way, customer money is gone and now they feign ridiculous technical issues in order to try to keep customers from calling the FBI while they wait for new orders to come in.  There is a possibility that with fees they could earn enough to fill that hole and get themselves out of this mess, but that doesn't appear to be happening, or perhaps the hole is growing (someone is continuing to take money out or they are continuing to mismanage the business and lose money).

[Vod]

But again, a ponzi doesn't make sense because they don't pay extra. They pay less after fees.
Ponzis pay crazy interest.

Not all ponzis pay "crazy" interest.

The simplest definition of a ponzi is using new money to pay old debts.

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[solidshotnosh]

But I don't believe the have old debts. I should be getting a refund tonight so we will see.

It's sounds like it was just an error between bitinstant and zipzap. Bitinstant seems pretty reputable, if these sites keep falling it's going to detrimental to bitcoins longevity if we can't trust any institutions that are established. 

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[RoadTrain]

But I don't believe the have old debts. I should be getting a refund tonight so we will see.

It's sounds like it was just an error between bitinstant and zipzap. Bitinstant seems pretty reputable, if these sites keep falling it's going to detrimental to bitcoins longevity if we can't trust any institutions that are established. 

If it seems reputable then why are they holding my money for 1.5 weeks and refuse to reply to my offers in my ticket for a week?
I think it's not far from a point when I actually call police.