Easy like Sunday morning
When we last left our intrepid heroes, UberJumper and his nameless (and unlucky) friend, they were meeting random strangers in parking lots and banks, only to be offered sacks full of unactivated Amazon gift cards and rubber checks in exchange for their hoard of early adopter bitcoins. That was weeks ago, and today we’re going to catch up and see how successful they’ve been.
One suggestion that came up over and over again was that they register and confirm their identities with Canadian exchange site CaVirtEx, and cash out there, since Mt Gox has a waiting list that extends into 2015 and other sites are even sketchier. The Canadian Bitcoin ATM is located in another city and wouldn’t be able to handle the volume they’re exchanging. So they finally ended up verified and find themselves halted yet again:
This is awesome. My friend dumps 5 bitcoins on Virtex to sell. Then tries to cash out his monthly max of 3k, and his account is immediately flagged as suspicious and locked.
It was then noted that CaVirtEx has excessively sensitive automated ban/warning systems.
We shall see how long it takes for them to respond to him. Considering it already takes a week apparently for them to send the money via wire transfer.
Someone explain to me how this is easier than paypal?
No one could provide an answer, and as time progressed, UberJumper’s frustration grew more and more apparent.
This is fucking retarded. Virtex is apparently so backlogged, the current estimate on getting verified is over a month. In the mean time Virtex holds everything you have on their site hostage.
We have tried to sell butts for the last 2.5 weeks, and we have only sold a grand total of 11 butts (i.e. gotten money for it), on top of this all of those sales came when we were selling for less than half the price.
With the price of bitcoin going up up up, i find it hilarious that trying to actually get something useful out of the stupid internet coins has been so fucking difficult.
Does anyone have an idea of how to cash out?
Yet again, gift cards were brought up.
Gyft doesn’t sell gift cards that work in Canada. Also Ebay does not allow reselling of gift card codes: http://pages.ebay.com/help/policies/gift.html
Resident idiot/troll how!! suggested meeting local weirdos from Craigslist, because he can’t seem to pay attention to the situation at hand.
Isn’t that what localbitcoins is for? We tried that and it was a tedious as fuck process, and we sold almost nothing. We try posting it on Kijiji, and got a single hit. So please tell me where the fuck are these magical people who are jumping over each other to buy bitcoin with cash.
These magical people are all apparently college kids buying weed on Silk Road, which had been closed down for nearly two months by this time. Every “replacement” Silk Road site has turned out to be a honeypot or a scam. how!! is clearly lying, but that was never really in doubt.
In response to yet another fool being parted with his money:
I find it funny that Bitcoin is what 1,000$, yet he is selling for less than half of that.
Tomorrow i get to go with my friend and meet two buyers
Does anyone know if you can go into a bank and have them check a cashiers check to make sure its legit?
The next day:
Ugh went with my friend to meet 2 buyers. Story time
We go to meet the first buyer at a bank, who wanted a 120$ in BTC. He didn’t show up at all, finally we call him and turns out he changed his mind and doesn’t want any after-all. So basically he wasted our time.
Yay
The second buyer was someone who contacted my friend through kijiji, and was interested in buying 25 coins at 500$/coin. We drove our asses out to the starbucks he wanted to meet us at, and fuck. This guy was a captain of industry, all he was missing was a fucking fedora.
He immediately started interrogating us on why we are selling, and lecturing us on how “selling at a low price is damaging the local bitcoin ecosystem”. I pointed out we wanted actual real money, so we can buy stuff with, and i don’t give a fuck about the ecosystem. The buttcoiner then proceeded to ramble on about all the awesome ways you can spend bitcoins, and other stupid shit, but he still wants to buy our coins if we are willing to give him 10 minutes of our time. Fine. He then rambles on and on about bitcoins, and how amazing they are and all sorts of awesome stuff, then rambles on about his personal projects (some sort of bitcoin exchange that is going to make it big).
Finally he shut up, my friend gives him the wallet to show him the amount he is looking for there, he “checks” it. Then announces he is tipping us “0.05 BTC to thank us for hearing him out”.
Then tells us he doesn’t have the money, but if we were willing to “invest” 25BTC into his project, we could get a major stake in it. We left right then and there.
My friend is currently gungho on figuring out a way to use bitpay to cash out (which i am pretty sure violates their terms of service, and i have no idea the legality of what could happen there).
Bad gimmick poster My Linux Rig goes the tried and true route, suggesting using an exchange website, which was never ever suggested or even thought of before.
Then please tell me what exchange will deposit money into a Canadian bank account that is not Virtex?
Coinbase? America Only
Mt Gox? My friend has been waiting a month now, and no indication of when he can get any money out. Mt Gox is as transparent as a brick wall with withdrawls.
Bitstamp? Still waiting for verification
CanadianBitcoins? Sketchy as fuck, you send them the coins, they mail you an envelope of cash.
Moving on:
Virtex has denied my friends identity verification and his account is now completely frozen. They give no explanation for what they want, or why it was denied.
Meanwhile, CaVirtEx is very very far behind in their, well, everything:
Total number of verifications outstanding: 1460
Date range we are working on: Nov 23 to Nov 27
Number of staff working: 12 fulltime, 6 part-time
Verifications completed today: 81
Verifications missing info and put into waiting: 92
Outbound Phone Verification calls made: 155
Customer service tickets outstanding: 1,190
The next day, they finally get a response.
Virtex responded to my friends ticket and asked him to resubmit his “correct verification information”. Then outlined vaguely what he needed to submit (which he already submitted), and told him to resubmit.
So another week+ to get verification attempt #2?
When my friend gets fully verified and we dump several hundred coins onto the site, what is going to happen?
The consensus here was “they’ll suspend the account for suspicious activity.”
Still trying, i am guessing the massive drop in price caused 3 of the localbitcoin buyers we were supposed to meet today to cancel.
The entire trying to cashout has been a massive pain in the ass. Virtex declined my friends identity verification, so i registered my self and i am going through the same process as well in the hopes Virtex will unfuck themselves. The entire system is shit. The longer and longer we are forced to wait the less and less likely it seems we will get a ton of money.
Two days later, they finally receive some “good” news.
So my friend gets an email that he is verified at CaVirtex.
Even though they say unlimited withdrawl limit, his user page says a maximum of 6,000$/month withdrawal.
Unless he gets their bitcoin debit card, at which point he can directly convert his BTC to cash through the card. But neither me or him could find anyone actually using the card online and giving their impressions. So he has ordered one, as a means of hopefully expediting the cashout process.
So he submitted a request to withdraw $6,000, from Virtex and we shall see how that goes. 3-5 Days for a money transfer.
The amount of times i have seen bitcoiners say “You can instantly convert BTC to cash”, is such bullshit.
Three days later, everyone who predicted “suspended for suspicious activity” wins! They don’t really win anything, except maybe for some laughs.
What the fuck is wrong with Virtex. Firstly they advertise Unlimited amount Withdrawls if you fully verify with them. When it is actually has a hard limit of 25,000$/month (after calling them and asking).
Then this afternoon they froze my friends account and cancelled the request for withdrawl, and cancelled his sell orders due to “suspicious activity”. We call them get some lady who tells us to submit a ticket, and very bluntly tells us the only way they can help us is through the ticket system.
Yet we already have two tickets open and unanswered from last week.
CaVirtEx is less than helpful here.
3 Days now and no response from virtex about the locked account, i guess i won’t hear anything until Monday at the earliest.
Which is fucking retarded.
Dogecoin happened in the meantime and, despite being a joke, has turned into Bitcoin in fast-forward, which itself was just centuries of economics lessons in fast-forward. Nobody has learned anything from it though.
It has basically been a week now, and his account is still frozen, and i am still waiting on verification.
Also apparently they are not allowing wire transfers for now?
quote:
Dec. 17, 2013, 8:43 p.m. – Debit Card Loads and Wire Transfer UpdateThe Debit card load procedure is temporarily on hold, we will keep you updated as development occurs. For now, we will decline all your load requests so that the CAD is returned to your balance.
Wire Transfers are scheduled to resume shortly, please wait for an official date before attempting to notify or send.What the fuck is going on at virtex.
Nearly a week later, this is the last we’ve heard thus far:
Virtex has unlocked my friends account, yay!
Also Virtex has recently added something called “Large withdrawals” which apparently allow you to take out 25k+. Except there doesn’t seem anyway to use this method of withdrawl.
He just requested a withdrawal which takes between 3-5 days, and i shall see if we get anything by 2014.
Happy Boxing Day! Let’s see if anything happens at all or if this story ends with yet another theft/loss. Oh, by the way, it’s probably a bad idea to use LocalBitcoins.