I'm bringing you today a story on how I "lost" 107 WAX while trying to transfer them from the Hive-engine to the Binance exchange. Unfortunately, I have no one to blame but myself for this incident, as I was not entirely paying attention to what I was doing, and I've ended up making a gross mistake that costed me 107 WAX (luckily, it wasn't more). But there are a few nuances in this whole episode I'd like to share with you, which I think can be of testimony for the level of bad-intentions we are subject to on the crypto space, and to raise awareness to those who are new to it.
As many of us here, I had some WAX laying on my account, and I've decided it was a good move to transfer that to Binance so I could sell and take advantage of the recent price increase due to WAX being listed on Binance this week. Therefore, I logged into my Hive-engine account (that's what I use to buy WAX and send it to my wallet) and went to business.
My mistake was right at the start. I had already gone to Binance to collect the correct Deposit address and Memo, and armed with those I went to my Hive wallet and on the WAX token, I pressed SEND.
Yeap, the mistake was right there. What's absurd is I have done this same thing a few times before without issues. I should have done a Withdrawal instead of using the option SEND, and I knew that. By choosing the option SEND we are actually sending the funds to another Hive-engine account, and not to an external address. It's so stupid that I've done this, but in my defense I was pressing the button when I was approached by a colleague who started to ask me something, so I went ahead and tried to complete the transaction not thinking and while providing her with a reply, not paying the propper attention to what I was doing. I didn't notice I was pressing SEND instead of WITHDRAWAL, because I was distracted having a conversation. I'm dumb.
But now comes the shady part. After I realized my funds never arrived on Binance after 2 hours had passed, I've contacted customer support. First, on Binance. I've submitted a ticket to ask for the transaction to be reviewed, and provided them with the transaction info, as shown below.
First off, Binance was asking for close to a month to provide a resolution to the issue in question, which is already a little infuriating to know that it takes them so long to return funds if there is an issue.
Still all good, I'm a patient man and the amount was not something astronomical that would put my existence in danger. But nevertheless, I contacted them via Chat, using the Binance app. Very quickly, an agent hopped on the chat with me and told me she would not be able to help and she would need to transfer to a specialized department. Which she did. A couple minutes after, the "specialist" comes into play to tell me they will have to take a look into it and it will take time. They will get back to me in due time. This was yesterday night, and today in the morning I had already received the following reply:
Ok. Let's try another door. Next step: repeat the customer support request, but this time with the Hive-engine staff. Submitted ticket, was told to wait. Expected. Now comes the interesting part. So what exactly happened? Here's the reply I got from Hive:
I'd like you to pay real attention to the part where he states that "You actually didn't make a withdraw you made a transfer of the pegged token to the hive account named @waxonbinance, which unfortunately means the only way to get those tokens back is if that account owner wants to send them back."
So, someone created a Hive account using the same name Binance is using as an address for their Deposits. I made a mistake, and I sent them the money. I need to give credit to this guys ingenuity. This is extremely mischievous, that someone actually anticipated people would make the mistake of using SEND instead of WITHDRAWAL and that same someone created an account with the same Deposit address as Binance's so he/she could capitalize on other people's mistakes. This guy deserves some credit for his creativity, and I've learned the lesson this is Crypto, and this is the wild, wild-west.
I've ended up replying the following, accepting my loss:
It sucked, to be honest. Don't be me, and be a little smarter, is all I can say. I hope this helps someone not making the same mistake.