Just a friendly warning from someone who has worked with a ton of crypto exchanges!

Bitflyer may seem like a legitimate exchange on the surface and at one point, it was. Unfortunately, that’s no longer the case and I can firmly state that at the moment of writing, Bitflyer is a scam. Frankly, Bitflyer went from being an ok-ish exchange to becoming an extremely poorly-run one and ultimately, a scam.

To give you a quick example, I’ll share my personal story.

In 2017, there was a significant price discrepancy between most exchanges on the one hand and South Korean + Japanese (such as Bitflyer) ones on the other. To put it differently, there was a premium in Japan and especially South Korea.

To take advantage of the arbitrage opportunity, I ended up getting accounts at most decent exchanges in South Korea as well as Japan.

This wasn’t easy and in one case, it took ~4 months to make it happen. But hey, a bit of extra work never killed anyone, right?

Anyway, it worked remarkably well.

After crypto prices started crashing in 2018 however, so did the premium, so I pulled most of my crypto out of South Korean and Japanese exchanges. With the huge premium gone, keeping crypto there made little sense. Especially since these exchanges, especially Bitflyer, had awful platforms. As in genuinely awful. It’s quite amazing how unintuitive and clunky Bitflyer is, despite them throwing (I assume) a lot of money at it… c’est la vie.

It all went well aside from… you’ve guessed it, Bitflyer.

Back when I signed up for an account, they made me go though an extremely aggressive verification process, which culminated with them sending me a document via FEDEX! Eventually, everything was ok and my account was approved for trading. However, once I’ve decided to withdraw my crypto… surprise! They said no and told me I had to go through the entire approval process again. Essentially, they’re keeping my crypto hostage and there’s absolutely nothing I can do about it… except expose Bitflyer for the scam operation it now apparently is.

Fortunately, I don’t stand to lose that much money, so it’s fine.

But through this post, I want to warn others and make it clear Bitflyer is now a scam. Plain and simple, a scam.

Hiding behind copy/paste messages and corporate slang doesn’t change the fact that by keeping someone’s crypto hostage, you’re essentially scamming.

If you don’t want to do business with me, don’t approve my account in the first place.

But don’t change the rules of the game as you go by approving my account, letting me deposit and trade, only to eventually tell me you will keep my account balance hostage until I go through the excruciatingly difficult verification process again.

And make no mistake, more and more people are voicing their concerns.

Yesterday, someone even decided to start a class action lawsuit against Bitflyer @ Reddit.

I don’t know how many of you are active crypto traders but if you are, please do yourself a favor and stay far, far away from the scammers over at Bitflyer. There are a gazillion good exchanges out them, don’t let Bitflyer scam you. Just don’t.

If you’ve been scammed by Bitflyer and would like to share your story (on the record or off), shoot me an email at andrei@oneminuteeconomics.com.