\When funds are frozen on an AML basis, the jurisdiction of the exchanger itself rarely plays a role, because they often follow instructions from the custodial service that they use to receive and store cryptocurrency. Such services are subject to all international AML legislation of the countries in which they operate (in fact, all world). Therefore, your references and hints are inappropriate.\
The jurisdiction to which the exchanger is subject is currently completely independent of the international legal AML rules (due to sanctions).
Thank you for your subjective opinion on the matter, but firstly, it isn’t so. Secondly, please re-read our post. We have made it clear that what matters is not the jurisdiction of the exchanger, but jurisdiction of the custodial service they use for receiving and storing cryptocurrency.
it was implemented for the sake of protection from "consumer terrorism"
That's a lousy excuse. Every services on the planet can receive unwarranted negative reviews somewhere on the internet. That makes it up to the customer to decide how they value reviews. Giving the service the power to censor reviews makes the reviews utterly useless and worse: misleading.
Absolutely correct, that’s why we don’t remove reviews with at least to some extent grounded negative opinion, but just on our service they have “white background”. And red highlights relevant financial claims. Due to the fact that the system automatically switches an exchanger with several claims off, we allowed them to lift claims on their own (as, generally speaking, the option for the users to re-open the claim if, according to them, the financial question hasn't been solved).
Please understand that AML does not threaten the integrity of bitcoin ecosystem as such, but it only limits the work with gateways between the traditional financial system and the crypto world.
Of course I know Bitcoin itself will still work. That's not the point.
AML doesn't mean you can confiscate someone's funds because a previous owner may have committed a crime.
That is what fungibility means. AML also doesn't mean an exchange can return the funds after receiving KYC documents.
Firstly, the point is not about confiscation in this context, but about freezing for the time of investigation. Secondly, it is only your subjective attitude to justice. In a human way, we understand you, and we would also not want any services, including banks and brokers, to freeze any funds, but the financial world is what it is, and we comply with the rules of the world community, not groups of crypto-enthusiasts from the forum, although we would like the opposite.
We don’t have a notion of a “negative review” on our website, the red marks unsolved financial claims to the service.
Why not? I've never used your service, but is it an advertising service for exchanges, or is it a service to help customers find an exchange for their needs? If it's the latter then you should certainly have reviews, if it's the former then you're just shilling for the AML/KYC scammers like Freewallet and your service is absolutely useless.
We do not draw the line between neutral reviews and negative reviews as such. This is the website’s peculiarity implemented 13 years ago, in the future we would try to divide review not on three categories like now, but into many more categories. We understand that sometimes psychologically one wants to leave “something red” and not a usual neutral review with your indignations.
The icon is obligatory only if KYC is obligatory for every (or for the absolute majority) of transactions. It there are random KYC-check for transactions with high level of AML-risk, we don’t make exchangers set this icon. However, we always urge users to get acquainted with the exchange rules before the operation, after coming to the exchanger’s website.
I won't say this is intentionally misleading, but it's definitely misleading nonetheless.
The icon is obligatory only if KYC is obligatory for every (or for the absolute majority) of transactions. It there are random KYC-check for transactions with high level of AML-risk, we don’t make exchangers set this icon.
You need to add information for ALL exchanges with random kyc check may be performed and coins could be confiscated.
Alternative option is to say that all exchanges could ask for kyc.
This would be misleading. If this policy would be implemented in a limited number of services, but in reality, this happens very often, that’s why we would need to put mark on 90 percent of exchangers, which contradicts the principles of marking. We mark only those services that do something untypical.
Please understand that AML does not threaten the integrity of bitcoin ecosystem as such, but it only limits the work with gateways between the traditional financial system and the crypto world.
I'm calling BS on this. Bitcoin was intended to put individuals in control of their wealth, and take control away from governments and institutions who've bastardized the financial industry to keep masses beholden to their services, and therefor subject to their fees and control. The fact that we have the commonly used term "Financial Industry" in our vocabulary is a testament to their bastardisation of money. What "industry?" What do they actually produce? What value do they add to the lives of normal citizens?
Allowing governments and their "financial institution" cohorts to apply their restrictions on bitcoin only allows them to continue their policy of using finances to enslave the populous.
Very nice remark, and on the level of personal support we support your wishes, however, until the shops sell goods for bitcoin without its obligatory conversion to dollars to pay for the taxes in dollars, we cannot fully speak about the “future” of financial system.
Use bitcoin within cryptocurrency ecosystem, and don’t try to exchange it to fiat currency, then you won’t have to complaint at “AML-discrimination”.
What's wrong to send the coins back to the address it came from if the sender do not agree to AML/KYC. I personally do not see any problem since he did not convert it from crypto to fiat.
The problem is that many services do not have this functionality. The majority of custodial services accept and send funds from different wallets. Moreover, even if you allow that the exchanger will use “proxy-addresses” for cold storage, they would need subtle technical settings to forcibly specify what inputs to be used as outputs, as the majority of “wallets” do not have these functions by default.
What you describe would be a wonderful future for these situation, but given the conditions that this practice will be possible thanks to the improved software. Under the current conditions, the tactic you’ve described, turns exchangers into bictoin-mixers, this is unacceptable.
Currently, our staff number has increased sufficiently to process the majority of these cases manually, that’s why we are already working on changing this system — soon exchangers will have a very limited number of attempts to lift a claim on their own, without our interference. Please wait for this update, we are already thinking about all the details.
So what happens if I create bunch of fake positive reviews and ''attack'' your system like that?
Why don't you consider that to be abuse in the same way like you consider ALL negative reviews?
For example, I could hire bunch of people to make minimal transaction and write 100 or more positive reviews for openchange or any other exchange I want.
You can't control this manually and delete every negative review like you are doing now.
We did write earlier that this is a little bit old-fashioned functionality due to limited number of employees, not the number of our employees has increased sufficiently to manually control any reviews. Considering your hypothetic situation, most likely soon we would delete all the fake reviews, because moderators regularly check reviews marked as suspicious on a regular basis. We check over dozen of various technical parameters, besides professional linguistic analysis, to remove the majority of fake reviews, both positive and neutral, paid for by competitors of this or that exchanger.
A suggestion:
Before cancelling claims, how about asking the customer if he agrees to cancel his claim or how about having a buffer like number of days so if the customer failed to respond if he/she agrees to void his claim, it will not be a dead end.
Trustpilot uses something similar, we are also considering a similar mechanism, but so far it is difficult to implement in the current system (inner code of the site). It may be realized in the updated version, and so far we can only limit for the exchanger the number of attempts to lift the claim without our participation, so that they use this function wisely and not abuse it.
BestChange helps scammers to hide the truth.
Out of curiosity, I clicked through some other exchanges they list with a perfect 100% feedback rating. Here's an example:
https://www.bestchange.com/exwallets-exchanger.htmlWith 8 pages of feedback, and 30 pieces of feedback per page, this exchange has ~240 pieces of feedback. It is rated 0/57, meaning it has ~183 claims against it which it has simply cancelled and therefore do not show up in its ratings. It is incredibly misleading, and I agree, bordering on scam territory, for BestChange to allow these exchanges to simply nullify any and all complaints against them without any kind of resolution or verification the complaint has been settled.
A cynical person might suggest that BestChange allow this to happen since they are paid commission from all these exchanges, and so it is in their own interest to continue allowing users to be scammed by them despite a huge number of red flags.
This is not exactly like that. Besides “solved claims” users can leave simple neutral reviews without negative feedback. But the situations you describe do take place. However, you need to consider that the large number of solved claims means only that although there were some disagreements, but the claims what solved in favor of the client (otherwise they would stay red, if necessary, with our claim). Any user, if they wish so, can read all the history of reviews, we don’t remove them, we only don’t focus attention on them.
In simple terms, some minor disagreements of clients in the past, which were solved in their favor, won’t increase risks of losing funds of the current clients, therefore, we ignore this factor. Anything more serious is being controlled by our moderators manually, and if the violations are serios, we can remove the exchanger form the listing temporarily or forever, depending on the degree of violation.
Ultimately, I think Best Change are partly responsible for any financial loss customers incur as a result of directing users to their affiliate websites. Those customers would not have been diverted to (and maybe never would have found) the affiliate exchanges had they not been listed on the Best Change website. As for the exchanges themselves, the very low rates of scam allegations against them (via Best Change) means thankfully this is still at very low levels. In the case you mentioned, why was the exchange not removed for their listing?
Following your logic, if I visit a phishing website through Google, they bear financial responsibility for my loses? Sounds absurd, isn’t it? But you allow these statements in our address, because you want it this way. If you want to whitewash google saying that they don’t accept funds from fraudsters, do google that information. We can even share our case, when for many weeks we were trying to no avail to remove via their slow support a phishing of our service which was in the google Ads.
Of course, this in no away justifies financial claims that happen from time to time due to real loss of funds, and we are truly sorry for the victims in these or those situations. But we don’t have any legal binding with these services where users exchange their funds, formally we are a simple informative resource, that is why we must not make any compensations, although from the heigh of our authority we try to put pressure on exchangers when they, in our opinion, are wrong, to return the funds to the victims, and if necessary, in extreme cases, we transfer all the information we have to law enforcement agencies.
Information that we do no bear financial responsibility is clearly stated in several places on the website. And it is so, even if you want the opposite.
