DISCLAIMER: This post by no way has any purpose of seeking for help on this forum. I am fully aware of what I have done wrong (trusted a shady CEX with a shady CEO a considerable amount) and this post has a sole purpose of raising public awareness.

MY PROBLEM WITH HTX:

I have opened my account on the HTX (Huobi) exchange on 2024-07-15 because I wanted to sell my Monero and buy some other coins like ETH or BTC. On that exact day I deposited 1500 XMR, sold them and successfully bought 70 ETH on that exchange that I was able to instantly withdraw without any issues to my EOA.

A few days later, on 2024-07-19, I have decided to sell another 1500 XMR on the same exchange, since I had good experience before. I have bought another 70.1472 ETH and decided to withdraw them to my non-custodial wallet, since I prefer to keep my funds on-chain instead of under third-party custody. This time withdrawal failed with the weird error "Failed to verify" and since then withdrawals in my account appeared to be suspended. 

I found the fact their automated withdrawal verification failed very strange, since I have used an Ethereum address that I had whitelisted during my earlier withdrawal back on 2024-07-15, which was the same.
My IP address and browser were also same and had not changed since my previous session on 2024-07-15. My withdrawal was also within their daily 5 BTC basic limit.

A few moments later, I have found that now they ask for a photo of me holding my national ID in one hand and a piece of paper saying "lifting the withdrawal limit, [date]" on the withdrawals page, which I found amusing and sent them a question immediately to clarify the situation. After sending them an inquiry in regards to that situation, I have received an email that my withdrawals were locked due to AML risk and not due to account security triggers of their system (so the lock reason is definitely not "to protect my account") and guaranteed to me that after providing the photograph of me with my ID and custom text, my withdrawals will be unlocked within 3 days.







I have then uploaded the photo of me they asked for and provided them with my mobile phone, after what their system informed me that they will call me in case there are any questions and the result of the verification will be sent via SMS (in the previous page and its screenshot).



That week I had lots of bussiness and travel to make and had no opportunity to give my account too much attention as I was awaiting for a phone call or SMS from HTX and was sure that was about to happen. During the whole week there were no calls, SMS or emails sent to me. The only email I got from them was about some promotion of their, nothing else.
Then after returning back home after a long journey, I have finally logged into my HTX account and saw the following message on the withdrawals page:



To my surprise, they have denied my photo ID without any single notification! No phone call, no SMS, no emails!

I was so angry and stressed that I started to write in their support chat with an agent who informed me that "this page has been closed". My thoughts: "WTF! What page? What's going on? Was I supposed to login into my account but was not informed about it??? But they have informed me they would call me if there are any questions! Liars, fraudsters!", that you can also see on these screenshots of my brief conversation:



Nobody informed me that I had to login into my account and had to keep the page with the verification request opened 24/7. It would be a total nonsense to do so after all, because they have explicitly informed me the verification result will be sent by SMS/email or there would be a phone call if there are any questions.

These guys have lied to me that they sent emails in fact, because my email was fully working during a whole week and I was receiving some random promotions from HTX, but absolutely no emails related to verification.

I have submitted a new withdrawal unsuspension request sending them again the awkward selfie with me holding a piece of paper and my ID. This time I have kept opened that page and turned out they only communicate on this matter inside the withdrawal unsuspension request page itself:



So they request SoF with an assumption that the only way of acquiring XMR is to buy it from someone. They for some reason discard other possible ways of acquisition such as mining or earning the coins.

I have told them that I have no way to satisfy their request because my XMR come from 2017 mining hype in which I participated and mined lots of XMR with powerful rigs, but they now ignore me completely and refuse to return me my coins.

After searching around the Internet and not only through crypto-related resources about them like CMC, I have found that their exchange (HTX) got hacked several times, as various news headlines suggest: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=htx+hacked

Now I think that they want to scam random users like me to compensate their losses due to security breaches. I see no other reasonable explanation on why such an old exchange would do such shenanigans, but it's definitely related to their new CEO Justin Sun who recently bought the entire platform that now selectively scams users.

Obviously there is no way to expect that suing them would bring anything positive short-term, since I am from Ukraine and they are island-based company with random offshore companies. I am planning to move to Poland soon, however, and maybe get a right to stay there on a legal basis, which I would probably use to file a complaint against HTX in some EU jurisdiction, which I doubt would work, but I will try still.

For sure this is not a *too big* amount for me personally, as I work with bigger amounts on a daily basis and never had such a problem with other exchanges, but still for sure it's a very inconvenient situation that ruined some business plans for me and my partners.

Meanwhile I hope nobody else will experience the same situation with this exchange so stay away from this scam exchange and their scammer CEO Justin Sun who currently holds my funds without any meaningful reason.

DETAILED INFORMATION:


I will provide as much as possible information and screenshots to prove this is not some fake story so people can verify everything themselves.

Amount the HTX (Huobi) exchange stole from me: 71.5 ETH ~ 3.1 BTC (~ 250000 USD at the day when they locked my withdrawals, 2024-07-19)

First XMR deposit of 1500 XMR (transaction ID and public view key): 40cd807c898ca581ef0a923e063ad738841286824a882f736347eba65af57483 (view key ac9f03bb4b91a98a1649d6aabca6353b45016ffd1e1379e1656dd461ef63030f)

Second XMR deposit of 1500 XMR (transaction ID and public view key): 1f3703b846c7398aa1d307a9fd6e8adae0fc76a3b518274d5207e41f91ba8fb2 (view key 6f30e029f0572ed0237f0a2867bf41d609136b6cf17004bd511001f4b69d9808)

Ethereum withdrawal after first 1500 XMR deposit (transaction ID): 0x368df14c25a7b6d4f50656bc290224768531a170c23fac87ca25c761a807c930 (note that funds were never mixed with unreliable/unknown sources, so there is even no ground to accuse me of something like that)

The only Ethereum address that is a whitelisted address in the account and that was used to make all the withdrawal requests:

Screenshot of account deposits:



Screenshot of account withdrawals:



Screenshot of account's whitelisted withdrawal address:




Screenshot of account balances on 2024-07-21:




Screenshot of account balances on 2024-08-15 (I have lost around 25% in USD as my initial plan was to convert ETH to USDT when I was trying to withdraw):




SIDE QUESTIONS&ANSWERS:

• Why post about this on Bitcointalk?

I have found that Bitcointalk continues to be the only communication platform that contains up-to-date information about a vast variety of crypto projects and exchanges. The overall post frequency might not be faster than for example Reddit or Twitter, but the overall quality of information here is far superior than on the previously mentioned platforms. Information on Reddit and Twitter also tend to disappear after some time, and here not.
If some exchange starts to rob its users, the best to inform others about it is this forum as people here tend to combat disiformation and fake reviews. Let's see how soon Justin Scum & Co will start sending bots to this thread though.

• Is the problem KYC?

No, I do not reject to provide KYC. I have selected HTX because they offer daily 5 BTC KYC-free withdrawal limit and I was aware that they might have asked for KYC any time. What I have not expected is them asking for proof of source for XMR that I have mined year ago and also refusing to return me my money in a good faith.
I have also passed KYC already and provided them two different photographs of me holding my ID and a text stating the photo date, which pretty much shows I don't have any problems disclosing my identity to them as my funds come from entirely legal source.

• Is the problem "tainted" funds/AML?

No, because my XMR come from entirely legal source (mining back in 2017), however, since the original wallet used to accumulate mined coins and the rig were lost in a sea transport accident many years ago, I have no way to show them that. After all, I see no reason why that offshore exchange would need that anyway as some data shows they do not care too much about compliance.

Sadly this is the harsh reality that many crypto traders face when they deposit significant amounts of cryptocurrencies to centralized exchanges whose terms and AML agreements basically give them the right to implement any ridiculous policies they see fit. The bad thing is that they can always say, by signing up to our service, you agreed to our terms, giving them the right to block, freeze, and confiscate anything they believe is against the rules.

Their terms mention the International Court of Arbitration (ICC) in case you can't resolve your disputes with the exchange. If you believe that you have a valid case, you can get in touch with them to see what they say.

Is this HTX exchange still having this alleged 5 BTC kyc-free withdraw rule active?
I never heard anyone asking for source of monero coins, nobody is stealing this coin from exchanges, and this is almost impossible to prove.
This all sounds like they are finding excuse for to keep customer funds and they are making impossible requests.

PS
I think you should move this topic to scam accusation board:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=83.0

Because they can do whatever they want. Once you send your money to CEX, you are at their mercy.

Perfect example of selective scamming and another cautionary tale about the dangers of using centralized exchanges.

I agree with you, they should delist it, settle deposit limits or at least displaying some serious warnings about deposits and trades with this coin. I wonder if they don't allow free deposits and trades without warnings in order to get some good excuses to lock and seize customers funds by invoking AML rules. But I also wonder if it was the first account on this exchange of OP. Because it's surprising for me to deposit such amounts only few days after opening an account on an exchange you don't know, especially for this kind of touchy crypto(privacy coins).

Yeah, makes me wonder too if this is his first account but it could likely be. There's a serious cracking down for XMR by the government and exchanges like this are scared of that, they have to completely remove/delist it from their supported crypto if that's the main concern just like what happened to OP. Also, what you have said is a good idea that depositing it might cause some trouble aside from that warning about transferring to the wrong network. But then, if there are some other intentions that we will never know on their side, experiences like this are helping us on what exchange to avoid. Because the first trade of his was good but then the next one, the problem occurred.

HTX / Huobi / Justin Sun still hold and refuse to return my funds in a total amount equivalent to ~3 BTC.

Any reasoning provided by me and appeals to refund my funds are being rejected. They are wasting my time with questions that make no sense just to continue holding my money. I have already provided them with all the information I could provide e.g. screenshots of my wallets that demonstrate funds flow. The initial deposit is XMR so there is zero ground to hold my funds as my funds did not participate in any illicit activities.

I consider this a scam. Till my funds are not returned, I will continously bump this thread each month just to remind the community about dangers of dealing with such exchanges and how all these licenses, corpirate statuses and aggregator rankings mean absolutely nothing because they still can rob their users just like that and users won't be able to do anything due to legal unreachability of their offshore companies, that serve to protect themselves from users they scam.

Bump