[Updated 14/01/2018] My Battle with Bitfinex Support and a lost Google 2FA Key

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[Updated 14/012018]

So i got an email from twitter stating that Bitfinex has enabled an auto reset of the 2FA setting if your account balance s below a certain amount, so i quickly headed over to the site to see if it would work for me. It did so i now finally have access to my account although there will be a withdrawal hold for a few days, i am ok with that, at least i have access to my funds.

I'm pretty sure their support staff will be happy with their developers, i foresee a great reduction in support tickets being opened

[Update End]

So this all started with my phone having to be factory reset, in this part of the story i did all necessary due diligence, had a recent backup of my phone (Samsung Note 4) but to my horror, when restoring this backup it did not restore any of my apps and their settings. Now for the most part i don't care about all of that except for one. Google 2FA, upon opening the app all of my keys were gone, most important of which was the one for Bitfinex.

Needless to say i pretty much had heart failure and quickly started to read the exchanges support section and soon found solace that they have a procedure in place to rectify the situation, all that was needed to be done was to open a support ticket and they would contact me back with a procedure to follow to fix my horrible mistake.

Email sent!! first step done, now just to wait for their response, in all honesty i expected to wait a bit i know these guys are extremely busy with the recent increase in volume that exchanges are having across the board. But after two days of waiting i started to get extremely anxious. I started to scour the web looking for alternative ways to solve this issue and alternative ways to contact the exchange, the results shocked me.

I tried to contact them on Facebook, Twitter and Reddit all with no luck whats so ever. My research also showed me that many people have been waiting for over 30 days with no contact from the Bitfnex support team, while others were contacted and informed of the procedure to fix the issue but have had no contact since then.

Now i know that this is partly my fault, when enabling the 2FA you are apparently told to make a paper copy of the key so that this exact situation can be avoided, however i did not make said copy, i honestly did not even see that message. That being said i find it outrageous that people have to wait so long for support, especially in a case that a clients funds are essentially frozen. Not only am i unable to trade the exchange is unable to make money off of my trades which in my opinion is a problem for both of us, and should be a priority for the exchange to fix. I have still not heard anything from them nearly two weeks of sending the support ticket.

I suppose this is the problem that we crypto traders and investors are stuck with seeing that the crypto market is still in it's infancy, in a sense our funds being held hostage but these exchanges with no recourse to take them to task about it. We simply have to follow thier rules and work within their time frames. I mean if i had lost my banking ATM pin (something no one should loose as well) and the bank took this long to rectify the problem, they would soon loose a lot of business.

So if anyone who reads this can take one lesson from it, irrespective which exchanges you use, if you make use of 2FA make a damned backup of the exchanges 2FA key in anyway possible.

If someone has another solution to my problem or any other advice please feel free to let me know.