Sunday, 5th of December 2021
On Friday I posted on noise.cash a brief explanation of what I was doing all day. If I was to write all the happenings of that day it would make for an article I said, so here I am, writing about it today.
Have you ever tried to convert your FIAT to crypto and other way round yourself? I know many Philippino people do it, but the way they do it is sure different than in Europe or UK, as we have different banks and different laws, so I couldn’t really ask any of my friends for advice. Still it would be nice if you commented to compare how easy/difficult it was and what fees did you have to pay.
If any of you my readers are from Europe or UK and have done it yourself in the past, please leave a comment too and of course any advice would be greatly appreciated.
I want some ALICE in my life!
Those of you who read my article about the new crypto game ‘My neighbour Alice’ coming out in spring will know I’ve been eyeballing their token for a few weeks. From around $16 at the time of writing that article it just went up and up till it reached $28.66 at some point, almost doubling since I first got interested in this token.
In the past few days it has however started dropping, so I though to myself that it is a good time to buy some in preparation for the next land lottery. I also saw a post that you can stake your ALICE token on Huobi and get 100% APY from them.
This sure sounded like a good offer to me, so I headed to Huobi to open my account there. My KYC went through smoothly and I started playing with the security settings. I registered with email, then realised I will need to check my email whenever I wanted to login and I didn’t like that, so I added phone number and Google Authenticate and turned off email.
That’s when the problems started. I saw a popup saying that I won’t be able to make any withdrawals or transfers for 24h after changing security settings, but I thought to myself I won’t need to do any of these and proceeded with the change. How wrong was I! Firstly none of my 3 different cards that I tried to link to my Huobi account went through. I was getting a little upset and contacted support within the app, but they were not able to help and passed my issue to the ‘experts’ which were going to contact me by email and of course didn’t.
In the meantime I went to my Halifax bank, where I keep my account only to pay in cash conveniently and then transfer it to my main HSBC account. This time I wanted to pay in the cash to then convert it into crypto. Guess what?! One of my £20 notes got stuck in paying in machine as suspicious and I won’t get it paid in till at least Monday when someone from the bank will call me to say whether it was real note or fraudulent. Seriously? The luck with money today is just not on my side!
Huobi issues continue…
Next I tried to deposit FIAT directly by a bank transfer through ‘Faster payments’. I sent £10 test payment from my Halifax account that I don’t usually use and after some hours it didn’t go through. Then I also send another £20 from my Revolut account where I also don’t usually keep much money and that didn’t go through either. Well, these ‘Faster payments’ aren’t so fast after all!
I found Huobi Telegram group and asked for help there. 2 scammers DMed me to ‘help’ and one more asked me to DM him. These were insta blocked and reported of course, then admin of the group also confirmed that no admin will DM me first and gave me an email to contact support. As I was writing the email I saw a notification on my other phone saying that the first transfer arrived on my Huobi account. At least one issue was sorted, so I only explained my issue with linking cards. The automated reply came in Chinese! 🙈 Will this nightmare end?
Bitcoin.com transfer
In the meantime I noticed the price of BCH also dropping, so I decided to convert some FIAT to my Bitcoin.com wallet. That seemed rather easy at first. I created my moonpay account and followed the introductions provided. I wasn’t impressed with 8% fee they were going to charge me for this transaction, but I decided to do it anyway, as many token prices have dropped significantly and I wanted to get some on sale.
Well, although is says the transaction will take a few minutes to a few hours, of course for me it took looong hours! Never mind I said to myself and continued on my transfers quest.
Once I saw both test transfers on Huobi credited to my account, I logged in to my Halifax app and tried sending a bigger amount this time. Guess what? This one was blocked by my bank and I had to spend around 40 minutes on the phone to Fraud prevention, waiting in the queue and then explaining myself to 2 different operators. At first I didn’t want to tell them that the money was to send to cryptocurrency exchange, because I know banks are all funny about it, but they wouldn’t clear the transaction had I not told them where I’m sending, so I was then put through to crypto specialised department.
Here I had to assure the lady that I am not being scammed by anyone, that I did all the transfers by myself, I used this exchange before and that the test payment of £10 was already credited to my Huobi account. The lady was satisfied with my answers and released my payment, while also warning me that next transfers might or might not be still flagged as fraudulent in the future. I was boiling a little inside, that I had to explain to some random people what I do with my money, but I am also a fast learner. While waiting on hold to be transferred, I already transferred the remaining balance from Halifax to my Revolut account and in the future I will be doing my transfers from there, as it seems the easiest and questions free.
Where does this end?
After encountering all kind of issues, I thought I was getting somewhere. I logged back to my Huobi and a nice chunk of cash was sitting there. The price of ALICE also dropped below $20, so I decided to buy some. Oh wait, I can’t! The money I transferred was in Exchange wallet and I needed it to be in Fiat wallet to buy the tokens. Of course I couldn’t do any transfers that day, because I tinkered with privacy setting earlier and all transfers were blocked for 24h!
At this point I went to google to check if Mercury was in retrograde, because so many issues in one day were just too inconspicuous to be random. To my surprise Mercury was going in forwards motion and I couldn’t blame anything on the poor planet.
My last chance of getting Alice
At this point I almost run out of options. I still had a small amount in my Revolut, so I decided to send it to my Binance, as I knew I could also buy ALICE there. P2P transaction of converting my £ to USDT by Revolut was the smoothest thing I experienced today. Finally I was able to swap my USDT for ALICE. I played a few arena matches, while waiting for the price to drop a little more and finally managed to get my first 6 tokens @ around $19 each.
Do you want to guess what happened next? Yes, the price of ALICE continued to drop more and more of course! On top of this, the only way to send these tokens to Huobi was through ERC-20 network and loose many of my tokens on the fees. At that point my patience run out and I decided to leave it all to the Universe to sort out and went to play my axies. Not a bad run I had here actually. I think I managed 8 wins and come out of misery of below 1100 mmr.
There are some good news too!
By the time I made some noise and finally fell asleep it was already gone 2am. I was hoping to dream about which tokens to buy. Instead I was dreaming about giving FATCAT NFT to a young buy who already embarked on his crypto journey.
The following morning I woke up at silly o’clock and it was still dark outside. I tried to turn around and continue to sleep, but my mind was on alert, so I decided to check crypto prices. Lo and behold ALICE token together with majority of crypto market was crashing! In fact I missed the total crash by about an hour. ALICE was @ $11 earlier, now bounced to around $14.
Happy ending!
Without any further delay, I purchased more BCH on this super sale price of $450 by already tested Revolut transfer and this time both transfers went through pretty fast. Friday’s drama was not in vein and I learned a lot in the whole process for sure. Not being able to proceed with my Huobi transfers immediately also had a bright side to it - I was able to buy many more ALICE tokens on Saturday than I could on Friday!
Until next time 💙
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Wow! A series of things gone wrong in a day hehehe. I might have gone crazy! But they were actually good delays and you had your Alice at a better price :)