The Case
So about a month ago I bought 14000 SiaCoin at around 320 Satoshi, I'd really grown to love Sia as a company, Their road map looks great, their development team are logical, intelligent and very pragmatic which is one of the companies most attractive qualities, Basically to explain Sia-Tech in very simple terms they are trying to create (or have started to create) a similar service to dropbox but using blockchain and decentralised software as a service, in this model you can either rent out your unused disk space or rent disc space in a Peer-toPeer capacity. Not only is this more safe and secure than dropbox but it's around 10x cheaper for cloud storage per GB. To make use of this service you'd need to work with their local crypto currency SiaCoin.
As you can see this company has lots of potential so back to my story, I bought this 14000 SC and a couple hours later POLONIEX disabled the SiaCoin wallet, It stated "Temporarily Disabled" so I figured it'd be back up in no time.
The Fight
A week went by, and after following the saga between the Sia Devs and POLO support, they were able to finally work together and get the wallet fixed, the wallet was re-enabled. Knowing what I knew now of the speed in which POLO actually solves issues I decided to take my SC out of POLO, I had read somewhere on reddit that some people were still having issues with withdrawal so I decided I'd only take 2000 SC to make sure it worked. Nothing. After several hours my 2000 SiaCoin hadn't appeared, I posted my troubles of Sia's reddit and the general consensus was that that it would eventually arrive.
POLO once again disabled the Sia wallet, at this point Siacoin was skyrocketting, it was up to 520 and climbing, I really wanted to move some Sia out of POLO to prevent myself from selling it all but POLO wallet was still down, so I decided I'd sell half Siacoin on POLO and buy on Bittrex because they'd had very few issues with their crypto's and support was apparently better.
The Scam
I sold SC at 580 on POLO, bought 4000 Sia on Bittrex and left it there, I really didn't like the feel of Bittex so after testing it out for a bit I wanted to move that Sia over to my Sia wallet, I moved the 2k from bittex to Sia Wallet without a single issue. POLO was eventually re- enabled, but I had still not seen my original 2000 SC, logged a ticket with support, 9 days later followed up with a message (This passed Friday) and still no response.
In the meantime SC has risen to 700 and fallen back down again to around 520 (still undervalued in my opinion), Now I'm sitting here going on nearly 3 weeks, not a single word from POLONIEX support, Trollbox was disabled due to people with open tickets complaining, basically I'm thinking that POLO may have just pulled off one of the biggest scams in the crypto world and there's absolutely nothing anyone can do about it. It's definitely not just me they've stolen from, even if it was just 2000 SiaCoin, today it would only be worth around $30, start calculating how many thousands of people could have been affected and how many of them would really have been heard if they complained?
POLO's payment history confirms that the money was sent successfully so really it is just my lonely voice buried beneath the many other issues this exchange has, Well done POLONIEX, you scammed thousands of people out of coin and still managed to remain the number two biggest exchange in crypto trading.
The Plea
Now I'm the first to admit that I'm no expert in crypto trading nor the ins and outs of my rights so Question I'm going to leave to this community is...
How far would you take it if it were you and what options do you really have?
Thanks guys!
Excellent post dear friend @satoshimoto very interesting all this information that you have cotermintado, thank you very much for transmitting your experience, I am working on some criptomonedas to invest some money, I appreciate this data
No problem at all, hope you see some great returns mate, good luck.
I also was investing in Siacoin on the Polo. Never had issues because I never withdrew Sia's. But I remember Trollbox complaints and the option of not being able to deposit or withdraw and the price was much higher on the korean and Bittrex.
I'm just lucky I didn't move all my Siacoin as I suspected something was fishy, imagine how many people lost all of it.
Yup. I lost some of gained money on the Sia exchange. But losing money by the Polo fraudlent desicions is absolutely bad. Consider the fact that many people were mining and collecting Sias for quite a long time.
Yeah, would be great if we had more stories on here so that their business gets affected by their poor performance, would appreciate a bump if you could mate, it might help.
Congratulations @satoshimoto!
Your post was mentioned in my hit parade in the following category:
Bittrex 100 times better than POLO! No server issues or payment issues!
I've been using Bittrex since this fiasco more and more, I feel better trading with them but their UI leaves alot to be desired.
What you mean by UI?? Not sure what this is?
Sorry, the User Interface, so the charts and just the looks and feel of the site itself, I've never had any real issues but just wish that you had a similar dashboard to polo where it makes it easy to switch between markets and track, now I land up using polo for market tracking and bittrex for trading. lol
Arrhhhh I see! I have only used Bittrex for trading, but I did try POLO a few times and it was really laggy! So I only use POLO now for lending!
Yeah I think I'll eventually have my whole trading portfolio moved to bittrex, I've sent them a couple emails for some suggested improvements, all I know is that I hope to not have to use POLO again as it looks like it's run by the mafia.
Yes there is something about POLO! I just see some negative comments about the platform! But POLO is the biggest exchange currently aint it I believe. I know a lot of people have moved from POLO to Bittrex so they are laughing haha..!
Are there any good exchanges available? Every single one seems to be scamming at some level from what I can tell.
I would love to have the answer to this question, there must be at least one trust worthy exchange out there?
I like you write ,very good article.upvoted
Thanks, appreciate it!
You dance with the devil when you trade on Polo, or any other exchange for that matter. They are all private companies with little to no regulation. And good luck contacting them.
When the XRP flash crashes occurred back in April people lost A LOT of money. So much so one guy set up a class action lawsuit website. A few days later that website eded up re-directing to Poloniex....
do you have a link with some more info on that story, sounds like an interesting one.
Yup. I clearly remember it cause I was trading when it happened, in XRP no less. As soon as the server came back up I started moving BTC out and over to Bittrex. Here ya go.
https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/jilted-trader-organizing-class-action-suit-poloniex/
Thank you for that info, I've started to move some of my portfolio over to bittrex, but I'm thinking more and more I should just move the whole lot, it's not worth the stress.
Always happy to help with what I know.
Who is to say bittex will be any better when their servers get overloaded and crash though? That's the problem, we need an exchange that will clearly give us a statement on events like server crashes. The trading should be frozen and/or rolled back to before the event.
I wasn't hurt in it because I don't margin trade, but the fundamentals of the market need to be intact for all traders.
Is there any discussion on this issue anywhere? Shouldn't the entire crypto community be involved in finding a solution asap?
Im going to repost this. Thanks
I was also hit! Was trying to withdraw sia coin. Im not trading with polo anymore.
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Are any of the exchanges safe? I know not to leave large amounts in the exchanges. Where do you keep most of your coins.
for the smaller crypto's I use the local wallets provided by their companies, for the larger cryptos I use exodus running on a OS that boots off USB drive. works very well as I can even boot a virtual machine on my main PC using the USB drive. plus I cloned it so one stays in the safe. On Exodus you can keep bitcoin, ethereum, and about 4 other decent cryptos. and the wallet works great too, has a built in exchange linked to shapeshift
they are working on a fix. i'm also hit by this incident with >5000 sc
We'll see how they will fix it.