Thank you all for the thoughtful questions and suggestions. There are several important points here, so I will answer them in detail.
It seems that your platform is bigger than I thought; how do you manage to monitor, 502 fraudulent, 353 fair, and 190 neutral exchangers. I read somewhere you mentioned that you do a kind of mutual review. How feasible is that?
Our review-monitoring processes are already well established, and we continue improving them. We pay particular attention to negative reviews and disputes involving withheld funds.
If a review was submitted by a real customer, we cannot remove it simply because the exchanger asks us to do so - even if the problem is eventually resolved. The customer, the exchanger and AntiSwap can all add public comments explaining what happened and how the case was resolved, but the original history remains visible.
We also plan to publish the number of completed transactions for each exchanger soon and keep these figures updated. This will provide users with another objective data point when choosing an exchanger.
Routine monitoring of new reviews is not actually the most difficult part. The much larger task was processing the initial database containing millions of historical reviews. We reviewed that history and recorded the detected scam cases in detail, including the amounts blocked by exchangers whenever this information was available.
Is there a possibility for a listed fraudulent exchange to become neutral or fair in the future, when they solve all their scam accusations and improve operations?
Yes. A fraudulent exchanger can return to Neutral or Fair status after resolving the problems with
all affected customers and demonstrating improved conduct.
This has already happened - but it is a very rare case, and only when the exchanger is genuinely interested in continuing to operate honestly. In most situations, a scam exchanger remains a scam. The original reviews are not deleted, and our comments explaining the exchanger's status change remain public. Users can therefore see both the original problem and how it was resolved.
This also gives us a useful form of pressure. Many exchangers do not want to stay on the scam list, and that has pushed some of them to return funds to customers even after they first refused to do so without KYC. Those cases please us most - they show that the work is not in vain.
In fact, this was one of the main reasons AntiSwap was created - to help stop the spread of AML scam and encourage exchangers to deal with customers honestly. To be frank, we believe we have already achieved some meaningful results in this area.
Imagine that a scammer launched an exchange, submit $20k escrow with you, scam $100k and pretentiously complete a $20k swap, then apply to be compensated from the escrow. If this happens, it means the scammer successfully took back the amount they escrowed.
How do you plan to solve this situation when it arises.
This is a possible attack scenario, and it would be dishonest to claim that it can be physically excluded. If a fabricated transaction is prepared carefully enough, it may be impossible to distinguish it conclusively from a genuine transaction.
This is one reason we always advise users that the amount of an exchange must
never exceed the exchanger's available deposit.
If anything starts going wrong during a transaction, the customer should contact us and leave a review
immediately. This allows us to suspend the exchanger before additional users are affected.
If there are several accepted claims against a limited deposit, the available deposit is distributed proportionally among the claimants. Therefore, in the scenario you described, a sufficiently convincing fraudulent claimant could theoretically receive part of the same deposit alongside genuine victims.
There is, however, a stronger option for users who want additional protection: the required part of an exchanger's deposit can be reserved specifically for a particular transaction through AntiSwap.
We temporarily reserve that amount so it cannot be used for other claims or withdrawn while the transaction is in progress. Once the exchange is completed successfully, the reserved amount is released back into the exchanger's available deposit.
Users rarely request this, but the option is available. If someone wants to reserve an exchanger's deposit for a transaction, they can contact us directly - arranging it is not a problem.
I think it will be better to translate the ANN OP post into multiple languages to spread information about the antiswap service. This can help the service to grow more in my point of view.
In this case, as an Urdu speaker, I can help translate the OP into Urdu. Similarly, you guys can ask other campaign participants to help with translating ANN into their native languages. Later on, you guys can add all translations in the ANN OP in its footer. What do you guys think about this?
We like this idea. Thank you for suggesting it and for offering to help with the Urdu translation.
We will look at how other services organize translated announcement topics across BitcoinTalk's local boards. The idea is excellent overall, and it is something we should work on.
We have seen other exchange monitors operate on the forum and users expressed mixed views about them because it was believed that negative reviews were usually deleted to protect the image of the exchange, as Antiswap how do you handle negative reviews when exchange desputes it ??
A user can delete a review that they personally submitted. However, AntiSwap does not remove a genuine customer's review without that customer's approval, even when the original problem has been resolved.
Instead, the user, the exchanger and AntiSwap can add comments describing the dispute, the available evidence and its eventual resolution. This preserves the complete history instead of pretending the incident never happened.
We only remove reviews that we determine to be fabricated and not submitted by a real customer. Exchangers monitor their pages closely and regularly report reviews they believe to be false, but a complaint from an exchanger alone is not sufficient reason for deletion.
AntiSwap has public threads on several forums as well as a public Telegram chat. If we removed a genuine review without the customer's approval, that information could quickly become public. We have not had such a case.
Considering that it'll be quite hard to check over 900 exchangers manually, I'd like to propose mentioning the dates on which you last manually checked each one on their dedicated pages.
BTW, I noticed the English version doesn't seem to apply to exchangers' description & review parts (for some reason, Google Translate doesn't always pop-up either).
Displaying the date of the latest manual review is an interesting suggestion, and we will consider how to implement it in a useful way.
Regarding English translations of exchanger descriptions and reviews: you are right, this is needed. I have added it to our task list, and we intend to improve the English version in the near future.
Scam exchanges are the top content, and they are all still regularly linked. I don't think that is the best way to degrade scammers and warn others about it, it seems that they are privileged compared to 'fair' services.
You are right. It was time to move fraudulent exchangers to the bottom of the list, and this has now been done. The current order is more logical.
Originally, AntiSwap was primarily a catalogue of scam exchangers. When AML scam was only beginning to spread, our goal was to demonstrate that this problem was being ignored in our part of the internet. For that reason, scam exchangers were deliberately given the most prominent position.
Later, after seeing the positive response on the forums where we published our research, we decided to develop AntiSwap into a complete exchanger-monitoring platform. Many improvements and structural changes have been made since then, so keeping fraudulent exchangers at the top no longer reflected what the project had become.
I just noticed that access to your platform is prohibited or you are just offline. I see this error message: File not found. Is this message appearing for everyone else or just me?
The issue has been fixed. Thank you for pointing it out.
I took a look at your website, both the clearnet and Tor versions, and I have some feedback. The website seems to be down at the moment so I can't provide a proper example, but I noticed that if you enter an exchange pair and click on one of the exchangers in the results, it won't always load the page with the correct trading pair selected. For instance, I tried with a swap of BTC to USDT. In some cases, that's exactly the pair I see when I click on your results. In others, it shows something random like XMR to BTC. The second thing I noticed is that the Tor version is only available in Russian. There is an option to change the language to English but it doesn't work. At least it didn't switch languages on my end. That's too bad because I wanted to see what's different with the info shared on the onion site.
Thank you for checking both versions so carefully.
On the first point: this issue is not on our side. We pass the exact pair selected by the user to the exchanger in the request. Unfortunately, not every exchanger handles this parameter correctly, so some of them may open a different pair.
The English language switch on the Tor version has now been fixed. Thank you for pointing out our mistake.
Thank you again for the questions, criticism and practical suggestions. They help us identify where the platform and our explanations need to become clearer.
