Localbitcoins stole my bitcoins just because I'm Iranian

[akram143]

I've got some good news!

lbtc just accepted my address verification!  
I can withdraw all of my money now. I'm so excited!  

Thanks everyone for your support and ideas.

Stop calling the sites are scam at first instances,good you got your bitcoins back.And the blame should be on your for not knowing their announcement which was way back longer and have enough time for people to withdraw if they did't like their KYC terms.

First of all, this wasn't in the first instance. I had been arguing with them for around 2 months over this problem. Second, they cannot hold my money because of their KYC terms which shouldn't have applied to me in the first place according to their own rules since I never had more than 1500 euros annual transaction amount. They can only prevent me from using their platform for trading bitcoins.
Third, I already provided them the required documentation for my address verification, but they kept rejecting it for no reason.

You are using their wallet also for that you may have to accept their terms of service.

So I am wondering whether you are able to trade on their domain now since they have accepted your address verification or you are still banned and can only make withdrawals on the sites only.

Actually no. my account is suspended. I can only withdraw my money.

Suspended because of?

Normally it will happen if you have unresolved disputes on trade and if this is you also can't withdraw bitcoins as well.

[1714774964]

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[PrimeNumber7]

LBC doesn’t allow people located in Iran to trade on their platform. The US has sanctions against Iran. I don’t know the specific laws/rules governing the sanctions, but facilitating the transfer of money, including coin would probably be violating the sanctions. I wouldn’t be surprised if LBC had the US DOJ sign off on releasing the OPs coin out of an abundance of caution.

It is a very bad situation and the only advice I can offer is for the OP to leave Iran if he can. I am a little surprised he can even access the forum from Iran (it appears he is claiming to be in Iran).

[mmahdim]

I've got some good news!

lbtc just accepted my address verification!  
I can withdraw all of my money now. I'm so excited!  

Thanks everyone for your support and ideas.

Stop calling the sites are scam at first instances,good you got your bitcoins back.And the blame should be on your for not knowing their announcement which was way back longer and have enough time for people to withdraw if they did't like their KYC terms.

First of all, this wasn't in the first instance. I had been arguing with them for around 2 months over this problem. Second, they cannot hold my money because of their KYC terms which shouldn't have applied to me in the first place according to their own rules since I never had more than 1500 euros annual transaction amount. They can only prevent me from using their platform for trading bitcoins.
Third, I already provided them the required documentation for my address verification, but they kept rejecting it for no reason.

You are using their wallet also for that you may have to accept their terms of service.

So I am wondering whether you are able to trade on their domain now since they have accepted your address verification or you are still banned and can only make withdrawals on the sites only.

Actually no. my account is suspended. I can only withdraw my money.

Suspended because of?

Normally it will happen if you have unresolved disputes on trade and if this is you also can't withdraw bitcoins as well.

Because of being Iranian.
It's not the first time I get banned for my nationality! even the most regular services ban us. You cannot play any Origin games if you live in Iran, you cannot update your Nvidia graphics card or Intel chipset drivers, you cannot access GitHub, and many others that have become a normal thing for me.

If you don't believe me, you can check my feedback on my lbtc account here.

LBC doesn’t allow people located in Iran to trade on their platform. The US has sanctions against Iran. I don’t know the specific laws/rules governing the sanctions, but facilitating the transfer of money, including coin would probably be violating the sanctions. I wouldn’t be surprised if LBC had the US DOJ sign off on releasing the OPs coin out of an abundance of caution.

It is a very bad situation and the only advice I can offer is for the OP to leave Iran if he can. I am a little surprised he can even access the forum from Iran (it appears he is claiming to be in Iran).

Dude I'm not in North Korea I'm in Iran lol
We've got internet although we'll need to use a VPN since half of the websites are banned by our government and the other half are banned by yours.

[PrimeNumber7]

Dude I'm not in North Korea I'm in Iran lol
We've got internet although we'll need to use VPN since half of the websites are banned by our government and the other half are banned because of sanctions.

My understanding is the Iran government has blocked the majority of the internet and given the free speech nature of the forum, I would have assumed they would have banned this forum.

As I said, my only advice is to leave Iran. I understand the Iran government killed 1,000 protesters around a month ago and there are rumors they killed protesters who were protesting the Iran government shooting down the Commercial airliner. I would consider living in Iran to be very dangerous.

[mmahdim]

Dude I'm not in North Korea I'm in Iran lol
We've got internet although we'll need to use VPN since half of the websites are banned by our government and the other half are banned because of sanctions.

My understanding is the Iran government has blocked the majority of the internet and given the free speech nature of the forum, I would have assumed they would have banned this forum.

As I said, my only advice is to leave Iran. I understand the Iran government killed 1,000 protesters around a month ago and there are rumors they killed protesters who were protesting the Iran government shooting down the Commercial airliner. I would consider living in Iran to be very dangerous.

Well... Iran's both better and worse than what you think about it.
It's not "dangerous" to live here but it's not comfortable too.
To get a feeling of how it is to live here I would suggest you see the Peter Santenello series on his travel to Iran.
But about leaving here, that's not easy too. Since our currency value has declined our money and savings are worth nothing outside our country and if we want to move out we would leave everything behind and start our lives from absolute zero, which in many cases would be even harder than living inside our country.
I'm planning to apply for an educational visa to some country and study there for a while and then maybe come back to Iran, but after that I would have the chance to leave the country whenever I want.

[akram143]

snip.

Iran banned bitcoin,but localbitcoin still offers service for them

LocalBitcoins does not offer the use of its services in the Federal Republic of Germany, or the States of New York or Washington in the United States of America. You confirm that you are not a resident or governed by the laws and regulations of these jurisdictions.

So legality is not the reason why you got suspended.About your country no one can comment because rules differ for every countries and their citizen must have to obey them or better leave that country.

[TECSHARE]

Did you get your money back?

[mmahdim]

Did you get your money back?

Fortunately, yes.
Thanks for your concern.

[TheCoinGrabber]

Weren't you the same guy complaining about not being able to ship in the ICs needed for a project? Wow, this sucks big time. 

I don't have any solutions I can suggest and there's really not much you can do against them. If I were you I'd probably go follow Spendulus' suggestion of trying to make formal communications and hope someone picks it up and then try work out a solution from that. I don't know if social media are blocked there but if you can carpet bomb their Twitter with you complaint they might actually try to contact you since that's going to agitate customers.

Yeah, I'm the same person.
That's a good idea, I will try that if they don't respond to my support tickets. Thanks for that.

Heard you already got to withdraw your money. That's great! So how did the process went? Did they responded to one of your private messages or they responded to a complaint on their sm? Some people might also have the same problem in the future, it would be good if they already have an idea of what to do.

Also, what do you plan to do with your btc now given that you can't trade there and you probably wouldn't be keeping any in there again after what happened? Are Iranian citizens living elsewhere subject to the same restrictions?

[mmahdim]

Heard you already got to withdraw your money. That's great! So how did the process went? Did they responded to one of your private messages or they responded to a complaint on their sm? Some people might also have the same problem in the future, it would be good if they already have an idea of what to do.

Also, what do you plan to do with your btc now given that you can't trade there and you probably wouldn't be keeping any in there again after what happened? Are Iranian citizens living elsewhere subject to the same restrictions?

I think maybe it had something to do with this topic, maybe they were concerned about their reputation. Because I had been sending them the same address document for the past week and they kept rejecting it. I didn't put any complaint on their Twitter or other sm. I also opened some tickets but they were answered after they proved my Tier 2 verification.
If someone had the same problem I would suggest them to first open a support ticket, and then if they did not respond they might want to try to tell their situation on some forum or somewhere that might endanger their reputation.

There are lots of Iranian websites trading bitcoins now, but normally they have higher fees and lower exchange rates. There's also HodlHodl which has discounts on their fees for Iranian citizens but it's not as popular yet. I don't know about Iranians living elsewhere but I think unless they want to trade their bitcoins to Rials they would be fine.

[akram143]

^Still you didn't said how you can be able to withdraw your bitcoins when your account is suspended?

WW3 trending made the prices of bitcoin to hikeup on Iranian exchanges so you actually sold it for huge price right? or just holding them!

[tvbcof]

p.s. there are lots of Iranian businesses with .com domains 

They are still operating because the US let them. With a snap of a finger, they are gone.

img]https://images2.imgbox.com/19/06/0unWHgOh_o.gif[/img]

Going to far to fast on this runs the risk of widespread adoption of alternative addressing methods.  Some of them already relatively well developed.  It's always tricky to make a relatively trivial engineering problem into an enduring and insurmountable problem.  Can sometimes be done, but it requires a decent foundation and some care.

They never would have found capable people to develop the internet in the first place if they got people who would not make certain 'mistakes' (e.g., making the thing relatively open and relatively free.)  Now it's time to erase those mistakes.  I don't doubt that they are working feverishly on it.

[mmahdim]

^Still you didn't said how you can be able to withdraw your bitcoins when your account is suspended?

WW3 trending made the prices of bitcoin to hikeup on Iranian exchanges so you actually sold it for huge price right? or just holding them!

I don't know what actually happened but I don't see any error when withdrawing my money. I just get an error when I try to place an advertisement for selling bitcoins.

I'm holding them for now, since I'm going to exchange them for Rials and Rial value is highly dependent on the political situations like the triggering of the dispute process by the EU.

[Sadlife]

Maybe localbitcoins is an custodial trading site based on US. I've read here before that Iranian citizens are prohibited to enter any exchanges that are based on US, basically American government implemented a law banning Iranian's, to me that's just insane.
People should be entitled to withdraw their money no matter nationality they belong.

[iluvbitcoins]

Why don’t you send them something else as address verification? O.O

I live with my parents and none of the utility bills are registered to my name. I only have my bank account which they don't seem to accept for some reason :/

Go to the DMV and get proof of residency from them.
Most countries have this so I assume yours does this.
Maybe you'll have to pay a bit, but you'll have a goverment issued certificate confirming your address.

[akram143]

Maybe localbitcoins is an custodial trading site based on US. I've read here before that Iranian citizens are prohibited to enter any exchanges that are based on US, basically American government implemented a law banning Iranian's, to me that's just insane.
People should be entitled to withdraw their money no matter nationality they belong.

Localbitcoin is not from US,it is located at Finland.

Code:

LocalBitcoins Oy
Porkkalankatu 24
00180 Helsinki
Finland

[KingScorpio]

welcome to bigotted west, it never was about liberty and human rights for the us government it always was just about usd imperialism

[noormcs5]

^Still you didn't said how you can be able to withdraw your bitcoins when your account is suspended?

WW3 trending made the prices of bitcoin to hikeup on Iranian exchanges so you actually sold it for huge price right? or just holding them!

I don't know what actually happened but I don't see any error when withdrawing my money. I just get an error when I try to place an advertisement for selling bitcoins.

I'm holding them for now, since I'm going to exchange them for Rials and Rial value is highly dependent on the political situations like the triggering of the dispute process by the EU.

So are able to withdraw but not able to make an advertisement on localbitcoins. Are you able to deposit bitcoins there and make the buying/selling of bitcoins ? I want to tell this to my Iranian friend who was also worried about the localbitcoins policy towards the irani citizens.

[mmahdim]

^Still you didn't said how you can be able to withdraw your bitcoins when your account is suspended?

WW3 trending made the prices of bitcoin to hikeup on Iranian exchanges so you actually sold it for huge price right? or just holding them!

I don't know what actually happened but I don't see any error when withdrawing my money. I just get an error when I try to place an advertisement for selling bitcoins.

I'm holding them for now, since I'm going to exchange them for Rials and Rial value is highly dependent on the political situations like the triggering of the dispute process by the EU.

So are able to withdraw but not able to make an advertisement on localbitcoins. Are you able to deposit bitcoins there and make the buying/selling of bitcoins ? I want to tell this to my Iranian friend who was also worried about the localbitcoins policy towards the irani citizens.

I can withdraw my bitcoins but I cannot make any trades to other advertisements, or make my own advertisement. I can only use it as a wallet.
Tell them to stay away from it unless they're not inside Iran and don't plan to exchange them for Rials.

[iluvbitcoins]

Get proof of address from your DMV, send it to them and then report back to us.
These processes are always annoying, but I don't think they'll keep the coins you if you give them enough data.