Bitcoin, Altcoin Exchange Bittrex Eyed With Suspicion Due to Thousands of Mysterious Account Closings

Cointelegraph recently began receiving complaints about the Bittrex exchange disabling users’ accounts for no apparent reason. One consistent theme in every complaint we’ve received is that users have attempted to open tickets and have even sought help on the exchange’s Slack, only to be ignored and banned, respectively.

One user complained that he has six Bitcoin in his Bittrex account--over $30,000 at today’s values--and no longer has access to his funds and receives no answers to his support tickets.

Another user comments:

“My Bittrex account is disabled for more than 3 days without any warning or announcement. Their support do not answer anything.”

Another wrote:

“Although we submitted tickets about this issue to their support team, they with all obscenity and indecency, instead of responding to their users’ tickets, they just ignore us.”

Still another user suggested the bans may be tied to users’ nationalities. He wrote:

“In Iran, more than 3,000 accounts have been deactivated without reason.”

Another Bittrex customer emailed us, saying:

“I talked to many users in Telegram groups and the most affected countries are Syria, India, Iran, Russia, Pakistan and Turkey.”

Many of those who emailed us pointed out that they are using verified accounts, suggesting that it isn’t a KYC/AML problem.

At least two threads have been started on the Bitcointalk forum, here and here.

The affected customers are all getting the same message when they attempt to log in to their account: