Binance Can't Wait to Help You, Not Really.

Over the last year I have been watching closely to what is happening with Binance. From Binance.com, Binance.org to opening a Binance.us, CZ and his company seemed to be moving in a decent direction. Until recently experiencing it for myself I had heard stories about the appalling and dismal service, Binance Can't Wait to Help You, Not Really.

The Issue

The issue at hand is that Binance is unresponsive to their customers needs. Having used the Binance DEX in the past, I expected Binance US to work in a similar and seamless way. Wow was I in for a surprise.

I needed to send some BNB to Binance US to trade on some altcoins that were not available on the DEX as they didnt have BNB pairs.

So like a studious and well informed crypto operator, used the receive address from my profile.

Double and even Triple checked my memo ID as we all know those can be the trip-up for even the most seasoned of operators.

Click Send.

After a few minutes, and checking the block explorer was delighted to see that fabled word:

Confirmed.

All good from there, went into the Binance US wallet only to see a balance of $0.00

Not to worry, different exchanges have that happen from time to time. I even went back and screen shotted the deposit address and memo id to again check I was in the clear.

All good.

Now It's Time for the Ticket

So after an hour, I decided that I should contact Binance and inquire about my deposit. No rush, although slightly annoyed.

In looking through the service you can see that Binance has a mismatch of service portals.

There's the chat bot on Binance.com for the masses, but for Binance.us you have to submit a ticket. Simple enough, a description of the issue, including the TXID along with the Binance user ID and everything should be good right?

Um, No That Was 5 Weeks Ago

After submitting a ticket, the auto generated response came with a ticket number and a common set of responses.

Um, er.... I'm not a Binancian, especially because so far, there is nothing that would make me even want to be addressed by that monicker, plus please give some useful information.

Ok, That Was the Same Day Response

So after seeing that response and saying to myself, that any other time I had to deal with an exchange, wallet, or anyone else in the space, I'll probably hear from them in the next 24-36 hours. Again, no worries, yet annoying.

I indulged Binance for 48 hours. At this point, I'm thinking to myself,

I can see the transaction is confirmed. I can see there are NO mistakes in the address or memo for the deposit. Surely they can see it too. Just credit the deposit already.

Now at this point I'm not saying No Worries anymore. I'm saying this is not cool and let's get to the bottom of it.

There's Nowhere Else to Go

When you start to dig into the issues, there's really no where else to turn. Chat & email have proven unfruitful, maybe social media.

@BinanceUS & @BinanceUSHelp are the two twitter handles that you could turn to, but both look to be sparsely utilized with any substantive content going back to January of this year and even December of last year.

I waited in total a week before I started to resubmit and send responses to the ticketed email. Here's the interesting thing.

Seeing that the original response email asked not to send duplicates, after a week one would think that possible the submission was lost, did not go through etc.  So let's test it out.  After submitting an entirely new issue ticket, within about 4 hours, the new ticket was closed by a person. The email said this ticket has been closed by XYZ person and marked as resolved.  Resolved?  Resolved? Whoa!

Now I can understand that if a duplicate ticket is in there you want to clean things up. Wouldn't the first move be to rectify the first submission?

In total, I have been sending a follow-up email every other day now for the last 4 weeks asking for a status update to my ticket number.

Crickets...

Have to create paper trail here if needed.

Houston We Have a Problem

So now we are 5 weeks out from the original submission ticket. The TXID shows the deposited BNB exactly where it was 5 weeks back. No response from Binance.

I'm trying to put myself in their shoes. Around the end of February was a busy trading time and it seemed that there was news around Binance going down for an undisclosed amount of time. If that's the case, I am truly sorry for that.

We still have a problem.

When capital is tied up because of an administrative error on the exchanges end, it is costing everyone returns. Returns on the investments. Fees collected and time being spent having to clean everything up.

Over the years, I have had turnkey service as well as performance from Coinbase, Gemini, Coinex, Gate and a few other exchanges including the DEX's and swaps that are out there like Uniswap and a few others.

Less Twitter More Action

These days CZ seems to be more active on twitter with moon shot statements about Bitcoin than he is about running his company.

Sure if the guy is sitting on a bag of BTC, why worry about a few BNB here and there. Here's the problem, I'm not alone in this.

Last cant there was around 10,000 ticket submissions.

That is a problem.

Buyers Beware

Hindsight is always 20/20 right?  There's any number of ways to address a situation and if I had to do it over again, I would have just swapped for something that was in the DEX to move the BNB on to greener pastures. But that wouldn't have met the plan I had put in place for investment. Unfortunate.

While I am typically pretty chill about all of this. Everything tends to work itself out in one way or another, but in this case we have a problem. A Big F N Problem!

I believe the problem to be severe enough that until I see evidence to the contrary, I will recommend everyone in my circle and in my circle's circles to steer clear of the Binance exchanges.

The DEX is probably as low risk as you can get in dealing with the CZ crowd. I will gladly eat my words here if there is something that changes dramatically. (Murphy's law would state that as soon as I hit publish, everything will be rectified.)

Until then, tread with care folks.