Events made you scare about custodial wallets, centralized exchanges.

[Rikafip]

For a few people, this may be a very expensive lesson. 

Some may even profit, but only in USDT.

I have a friend who had a decent amount of stablecoin on FTX that he used for trading (at the moment of collapseall of his crypto was in stablecoin) so in the end he will get 118% of the money back. Having said that, if he used that stablecoin to buy bitcoin, he would profit much more.

[SilverCryptoBullet]

Some may even profit, but only in USDT.

I have a friend who had a decent amount of stablecoin on FTX that he used for trading (at the moment of collapseall of his crypto was in stablecoin) so in the end he will get 118% of the money back.

Interesting, I didn't think about it with 118% money back if FTX victims had their fund at that collapse moment in stablecoin.

Hopefully no people will try to take risk with centralized exchanges, their own money and hope an exchange collapses, bankrupts and wait for 118% compensation from the exchange. It is far than an impossible dream while most of times, dream won't come but nightmare knock their doors.

[PrivacyG]

I have a friend who had a decent amount of stablecoin on FTX that he used for trading (at the moment of collapseall of his crypto was in stablecoin) so in the end he will get 118% of the money back. Having said that, if he used that stablecoin to buy bitcoin, he would profit much more.

118 percent really is something.  If I was a victim of FTX I would not even hope for a single Penny to be recovered for me.  18 percent is something a lot of people miss on in Trading and Investing due to bad mistakes.  Your friend is lucky as hell.

[Alpha Marine]

I have never had a problem with CEXs but I have seen and heard things from people around me and close to me so I know better. I have always been against keeping my money in centralized exchanges and I always make sure my friends know this.


This was the email someone I know received from Bybit after the coins had been frozen. there was no opportunity to plead the case, they didn't even want to hear her out, nothing. The money is just gone. There was the usual back and forth and at a point they stopped replying. This is like sentencing a person without a hearing. There was over $3k in the exchange wallet.

I understand the security and the regulations that they have and that is even a reason why you shouldn't keep your money there. treat it as a marketplace if you must but always make sure you move your funds to a non-custodial wallet where you have total control of everything.

[Rikafip]

118 percent really is something.  If I was a victim of FTX I would not even hope for a single Penny to be recovered for me.  18 percent is something a lot of people miss on in Trading and Investing due to bad mistakes.  Your friend is lucky as hell.

He is indeed lucky, but he is really pushing it as despite having money stuck on FTX, he still has decent amount of money on Binance and Coinbase. So in the end he didn't learn much so the same thing might happen all over again.

[SilverCryptoBullet]

The biggest ever hack in cryptocurrency market history that values about $1.5B[/url] on Bybit is a latest warning that "It's not your key, it's not your crypto".

Some reports on this hack.
North Korea Responsible for $1.5 Billion Bybit Hack.
Leveraging Transparency for Collaboration in the Wake of Record-Breaking Bybit Theft [UPDATED 2/27/25]

You can read Crypto crime report 2025from Chainalysis to see high risk of practice of storing your cryptocurrency on online platforms.

About TraderTraitor from Chainalysis to see high risk of practice of storing your cryptocurrency on online platforms.

[SilverCryptoBullet]

Another event to remind you about danger with Centralized Exchanges. This time, it's Kraken exchange and an account releated to Metawin. Centralized exchanges are never good places to store your funds or to receive your payments from your business partners or your salary.

A post from Skel Metawin.

Hey @krakenfx, answers please. 🚨

My friend's Kraken account was shut down in January with no explanation, despite holding a 12 ETH balance (funds I sent them). 

Then, after closing the account, you transferred their 12 ETH into another wallet co-mingling it with 3,115 ETH, without their authorization.

They've now lost access to their funds, their Kraken account, and their account rep, who will not speak to either of us (see screenshot).

They've been asking for help, but you've offered nothing.

The move and subsequent behavior of the account manger is shocking even by crypto standards IMO.

Screenshots detail your communications and transaction which transferred the entire wallet balance in one go after you
froze them out.

I’m sure you’d agree this looks shady as hell right now.  Can you please explain it?
 
Please also contact the user and fix this. I’ll be happy to post again when you do.

Kraken replies

Kraken Support
Ticket number?

SKEL.eth
Ticket ? Mark Ross the Kraken account manager never gave a ticket number he told us he’s not on the account (because it’s closed).

Here’s the account ID it should help and you can see the transaction ID in the screenshots.

Kraken Support
Are able to have the account owner contact us regarding the funds in question?

SKEL.eth
They already did.  No response.

Kraken Support
Confirmed received, working on it
Trying to, need info first

[albon]

Another event to remind you about danger with Centralized Exchanges. This time, it's Kraken exchange and an account releated to Metawin. Centralized exchanges are never good places to store your funds or to receive your payments from your business partners or your salary.

A post from Skel Metawin.

I'm not surprised by what I read. After his friend sent the funds to a CEX, the money came under their control, allowing them to take any action on the customer's account or funds without his consent.

What happened is truly strange, and they should have explained the situation quickly to preserve their reputation, as it now looks more like a scam platform than one of Kraken's stature.

As I concluded from other customer comments, this platform has poor and extremely slow customer service. So, he’ll have to wait until they finally decide to assist him. The blame ultimately falls on his friend, who trusted them and deposited the funds there. All CEX platforms, without exception, are not considered wallets for storing funds, and anyone who wants to use them should review their ToS carefully to avoid regretting it later.

[SilverCryptoBullet]

The blame ultimately falls on his friend, who trusted them and deposited the funds there. All CEX platforms, without exception, are not considered wallets for storing funds, and anyone who wants to use them should review their ToS carefully to avoid regretting it later.

Many warnings about risk of fund deposit to centralized exchanges and worse store on centralized exchanges a long time. Firstly your first mistake is sending fund to centralized exchange and they can seize your fund immediately. The second mistake is storing your fund in CEX account a long time, and ignore risk of exchange hack, scam exit, bankruptcy and orher things that cause death of an exchange.

https://www.cryptowisser.com/exchange-graveyard/

[AmaGold70]

The rate at which staking rewards and high interest savings rewards are being advertised on exchange, I can only assume that they're running out of people money to use for their business and now trying to get new deposit.

Custodial wallet and exchange are just like our regular banks and I don't get why we're trying to leave the norm we know with our financial system and yet we still fall for the same tricks in the crypto industry.

Your funds are never safe with custodial wallets or exchange. You'll think they're until you get restricted because of some stupid reasons that you know nothing about.

Custodial wallets and exchange all have one thing I'm common and that's, they'll eventually get hacked or collapsed sooner than you can think so if you think you can get your funds off the exchange or wallet before they collapse, you're mistaken, boycotting them is the only way you can protect your funds.

Exactly what I thought, custodial wallet and exchange are exactly the same with our traditional financial system and it's funny how we trust these custodial wallet so much believing that it is nothing like our traditional financial system and I honestly think that custodial wallet in the crypto industry is the worst as anything can happen and we have no one to hold accountable for our losses, having a custodial wallet is putting a third party in charge of your funds, right? How do some crypto investors even think that this is ever safe? It is always safer to move keep your funds in a non custodial wallet where I can have full control of my funds without any third party.

[Aanuoluwatofunmi]

Was it not because of the returns they see with their investment on some of these exchanges that makes them uses the centralized exchanges together with the way they can trade on various pairs for the same motive of making profits, but all these could still be avoided if they have chosen more secured paths of doing them than using a centralized exchange, because this is where they are bad actors, you lose your asset with them if anything happens with them and they are also using your own asset to make more money for themself unknown to us.

[Potato Chips]

Another event to remind you about danger with Centralized Exchanges. This time, it's Kraken exchange and an account releated to Metawin. Centralized exchanges are never good places to store your funds or to receive your payments from your business partners or your salary.

A post from Skel Metawin.

Oh man, CEX closing your account, funds frozen, you're kept in the dark why and they're hard to get ahold is probably my biggest CEX nightmare.

And imagine if you're just an average folk with no big connections to people like Skel, it would be much difficult to apply public pressure to escalate your case.

Pretty much what happened in this thread, see: BINANCE STOLE OVER $10K FROM ME – NEED HELP FROM THE COMMUNITY

The OOP basically get shut down by binance everytime he opens a support ticket 😓

[SilverCryptoBullet]

Oh man, CEX closing your account, funds frozen, you're kept in the dark why and they're hard to get ahold is probably my biggest CEX nightmare.

And imagine if you're just an average folk with no big connections to people like Skel, it would be much difficult to apply public pressure to escalate your case.

Pretty much what happened in this thread, see: BINANCE STOLE OVER $10K FROM ME – NEED HELP FROM THE COMMUNITY

The OOP basically get shut down by binance everytime he opens a support ticket 😓

They have Terms of Service to allow them doing this legally, and play their cards against customers easily.

Be careful using Binance & Centralized Exchange.

A few days ago, I had an issue with Binance. For my marketing services, I had been receiving funds in my Binance account. One of my clients sent me 15 BNB there, and he had used Tornado Cash to mix his BNB. I had used Binance for trading; hence, I received funds there to increase my portfolio. So after receiving funds, Binance froze my account. Even they don't ask for any explanation.

OKX frozen my account and required me to KYC with a less than $1,000 deposit.

Today, after seeing the news that the OKX platform requires KYC, I logged into my account, and from there a small notice appeared to me that there are limits of $ 1000 (lifetime) for deposits and withdrawals, so I decided to deposit $50 to try it for the last time. After deposits, they directly frozen my account and asked to verify ID/selfie before doing anything.

Sanctioned Services and the service traceability to this forum, Any danger?

[SilverCryptoBullet]

It is advised that centralized exchanges are risky to use and they're not recommended places for storage of your cryptocurrency funds. If you follow this valuable advice, you will not deposit your cryptocurrency to centralized exchanges and I hope that you do it well practically.

If you did not follow this great advice, and actually deposited your fund to centralized exchanges, then unfortunately your acount and fund had problems, you can report it in the following thread.

[INFO] Updated Summary of malpractices and abuses of exchanges with a latest report on MEXC exchange.

[Ruttoshi]

It is advised that centralized exchanges are risky to use and they're not recommended places for storage of your cryptocurrency funds. If you follow this valuable advice, you will not deposit your cryptocurrency to centralized exchanges and I hope that you do it well practically.

If you did not follow this great advice, and actually deposited your fund to centralized exchanges, then unfortunately your acount and fund had problems, you can report it in the following thread.

[INFO] Updated Summary of malpractices and abuses of exchanges with a latest report on MEXC exchange.

It will be better to save yourself from the stress of reporting and looking for how to recover your funds by sticking strictly to being your own bank at all time. You can use exchange for your trade but don't use it as your wallet.

My own experience was not using the memo tag on Ton network and the money I transferred was lost. I wrote to the exchange and tried several times to retrieve my funds but it was all in vain. Assuming, I was sending directly from my wallet, I wouldn't have been ignorant of the memo code. I haven't lost a big amount to an exchange.

[SilverCryptoBullet]

There some latest frozen USDT actions from Tether and it's time to remind everyone about risk of centralized exchanges and stablecoins.

$182M in USDT froze by Tether.
It's related to money laundering.

🚨TETHER FROZE $182M IN USDT

Tether froze $182M across 5 Tron wallets holding $12M to $50M each with no disclosed reason.

Since 2023, Tether has frozen $3.3B and blacklisted 7,268 wallets, according to AMLBot.

🚨 According to @0xG00gly, #Tether has frozen approximately $182 million USDT on the #TRON network, spanning five wallets, marking one of the largest USDT blacklist actions to date—exceeding the total amount of USDC ever frozen.

If anyone still don't know about risk of centralized stablecoins.
PSA: Most Stablecoins Can Be Frozen, Even in Your Own Wallets.
Stablecoin Blacklists: How They Work and Who Controls Them.
Stablecoins and blaclists.


People usually don't change their habits even bad ones, and they often repeat their mistakes.

After the Large-scale Coldcard compromise (1485.77 BTC stolen so far), that is a largest hack on a hardware wallet in history, there is a new trend: creating new accounts or addresses, and making deposits to exchanges.

[04 August 2026] The Big Migration: On-Chain Repercussions of the Coldcard Hack.

This trend is opposite with what happened after Terra and FTX collapses in 2022. Now many people need someone, some services to secure bitcoin and cryptocurrency funds for them, and they also need someone, some services to blame responsibility on.

Then the cycle repeats, and exchanges will be hacked or scam exit or bankruptcy and they will withdraw fund from exchanges to self-custodial wallets again.

[mod note: merged consecutive posts]

[Nathrixxx]

When we are choosing for hardware wallets, she also be careful to decide on a reliable brand before we could secure one for ourselves, I so much appreciate Trezorfor use, the recent event with coldcard will teach many of us some lesson to ensure that we are expected to not have our assets on a single wallet, then we should also be well informed about some security vulnerabilities that are going on with some wallet types we may be considering for use, ledger is one of the hardware wallet we should always avoid if we genuinely cherish our privacy.

[uchegod-21]

People usually don't change their habits even bad ones, and they often repeat their mistakes.

After the Large-scale Coldcard compromise (1485.77 BTC stolen so far), that is a largest hack on a hardware wallet in history, there is a new trend: creating new accounts or addresses, and making deposits to exchanges.

[04 August 2026] The Big Migration: On-Chain Repercussions of the Coldcard Hack.

This trend is opposite with what happened after Terra and FTX collapses in 2022. Now many people need someone, some services to secure bitcoin and cryptocurrency funds for them, and they also need someone, some services to blame responsibility on.

Then the cycle repeats, and exchanges will be hacked or scam exit or bankruptcy and they will withdraw fund from exchanges to self-custodial wallets again.

Another evidence that majority of bitcoin users do not practice what they claim they believe in. They say one thing but do the exact opposite. As long as the bad habit is convenient, they will not change, they will rather move to another centralised platform they believe is more secured than looking towards self custody. I am now thinking that people are more scared of self custody than they are scared of having third parties control their keys and have access to their bitcoins. Or maybe you are right; they probably may just be looking for who to pin the blames on incase anything goes wrong. Truly, people never learn.

[coinlary]

If anyone still don't know about risk of centralized stablecoins.
PSA: Most Stablecoins Can Be Frozen, Even in Your Own Wallets.
Stablecoin Blacklists: How They Work and Who Controls Them.
Stablecoins and blaclists.

The bad aspect is that they have the power to freeze assests but most  people will agree that  Identified money laundering cases deserved to frozen anyway .

This trend is opposite with what happened after Terra and FTX collapses in 2022. Now many people need someone, some services to secure bitcoin and cryptocurrency funds for them, and they also need someone, some services to blame responsibility on.

Then the cycle repeats, and exchanges will be hacked or scam exit or bankruptcy and they will withdraw fund from exchanges to self-custodial wallets again.

While some people aren't even aware that BitMart is about to vanish with their users money (gradually turning to an exit scam ) and yet people still think they can trust their entire live investment on such services .

Well, every individual is responsible for their money and they can decide on whatever they want but I would prefer to take responsibility over my Bitcoin and acts as my own bank  than giving it to a service to act as a bank over my bitcoins .

[IjawMan]

If anyone still don't know about risk of centralized stablecoins.
PSA: Most Stablecoins Can Be Frozen, Even in Your Own Wallets.
Stablecoin Blacklists: How They Work and Who Controls Them.
Stablecoins and blaclists.

The bad aspect is that they have the power to freeze assests but most  people will agree that  Identified money laundering cases deserved to frozen anyway

This idea will want to create an argument for centralised coins and exchanges in managing to combat  cybercrime and fraud on money laundering. But it still doesn't outweighs the risks in using centralised exchanges and coins for normal users.

__

While some people aren't even aware that BitMart is about to vanish with their users money (gradually turning to an exit scam ) and yet people still think they can trust their entire live investment on such services .

Well, every individual is responsible for their money and they can decide on whatever they want but I would prefer to take responsibility over my Bitcoin and acts as my own bank  than giving it to a service to act as a bank over my bitcoins .

We are at an epoch when information is truly powerful in our society and who so ever is not making effort to be informed will certainly get deformed by losing their assets in a horrible way.