Btc-e.com was banned by US government due to legal issues. The domain is still not available and thus a lot of fuss about it.
A lot of people lost their funds on this exchange. They did return however but not with full quantity. People had to lose more than 30% of their funds and were promised tokens in return, which haven’t reached the value of original coin till now.
So is wex.nz scam? or reliable?
Well honestly, the website is not up to the mark with poor coding and trading practices and codes. This makes it unreliable and non-serious again!
What’s your experience with wex.nz and what’s your review about wex or btc-e?
UrduBit claims to be the first Pakistan based BitCoin trading platform. In this post we will examine if it’s scam or legit. And even if legit, is it reliable or not to trust it with our bitcoins. Along with pros and cons of this platform.
Summary of Negative points
These are few negatives and cons about UrduBit which make it at least unreliable and untrustworthy, if not a scam!
Not registered with government of Pakistan
Ask for original documents and pure signature of the user – as personal policy (not government requirement)
Only 3 person team
Are not technical, didn’t even know about if offline wallets exist
Money not spent well on website, SSL certificate is FREE one, Chat script is FREE, and so on, making it insecure and unreliable to send and hold our money and documents
They share private info and screetshot from official platform to public without even asking, imagine how secure your documents and signature are with them
Details of these points plus many more are discussed below.
Update: Don’t forget to eat the conversation with UrduBit support in the end.
Domain Analysis of UrduBit.com
The domain name was registered in 2014 for 1 year
In 2015 it was renewed for 3 years
Domain expires in 2018
The owner is from Pakistan while the technical contact is from USA
Any serious company wouldn’t register or renew their domain for anything less than 10 years. Especially when it’s dealing with people’s money.
We can see this information in the domain whois, shown in the image below:
Wayback machine’s analysis
The wayback machine analysis for UrduBit shows that the site haven’t changed or updated its main design ever since 2015.
However, they did remove their phone numbers and address from the footer. The address and phone numbers shown on the footer were:
I’m not sure why would they remove it. Especially because the numbers were present on the site till last April 2017.
Anyway, the contact number and address of UrduBit.com team are:
Amazingly, the SSL certificate (crypto technology) used by the CryptoExchange, UrduBit, is the Universal SSL of cloudflare, which is free with free account ofcourse!
The SSL used is:Â COMODO ECC Domain Validation Secure Server CA 2
Seriously? You want me to give you my information, verfication data and even access to all my cryptocurrency on a universal and free cloudflare ssl? Which got hacked recently last time!
A huge turn off and negative part. I wouldn’t trust them in anyway after seeing this!
Verification process analysis
I tried checking their verification process. They require you to verify your identity before you can add funds to your UrduBit account.
Guess the amazingness of this process. The verification process looks like this:
Did you see that? No you didn’t! Let me show you!
Signature? Seriously? What for?
National ID card picture while holding it?
Yes I understand that many websites these days ask people to verify using the id card like this. But wait, does paypal do that? Does any other monetary site do that? Then why are you just following the weird sites which ask you to do this? Can’t someone photoshop this to have any card in anyones hand too? Come on!
And wait, signature? You need me to submit a pure signature so that you can use it anywhere? Wow!
Ok even if you’re a pious angel, what’s the guarantee that the hacker who’s getting all my data coming to your server due to the FREE SSL you’re using from cloudflare? Who’s gonna take guarantee of that?
Zendesk not whitelabelled
As it’s apparent from the chat screenshots below, the zendesk support they’re using is not whitelabelled. Which clearly shows the level of investment and seriousness they’ve for this project.
Team lacks knowledge of Cryptocurrency or CryptoWorld
Checkout the conversation between UrduBit and me while trying to figure out their policies and process.
The staff was responding after ages
The guy didn’t even knew what are offline wallets
The guy ran away
The transcript of this conversation is as follows:
Chat started on 12 Jun 2017, 10:48 AM (GMT+0) (10:48:25)*** nabtron joined the chat *** (10:48:25)nabtron: to any offline wallet (10:48:48)*** Support joined the chat *** (10:49:09)Support: apka wallet kahan per hai? (10:50:07)nabtron: brother, ap new ho crypto ma shayad, please google for “offline wallets” 🙂 (10:55:37)*** Support left the chat *** (11:04:33)*** nabtron has commented: seriously? you guys don’t even know what an offline wallet is? *** (11:04:38)*** nabtron has rated the chat Bad *** (11:05:03)nabtron: I’m going to blog about this chat dude!
You can well imagine the level of the team who don’t even know what an offline wallet is! It’s a big turn off for me and I won’t be trusting them ever in the future with my money, bitcoin or any cryptocurrency.
Irony is, the guy simply quit and ran away when he realized that he don’t know what an offline wallet is.
Twitter account full of Excuses
How can you simply close the market for 3 days? Wow! I can only imagine the type and mindset of people who would invest in such a market which could simply go down for days and simply tweet about it!
The twitter account of UrduBit.com is full of issues and excuses! Have a look at few recent tweets:
Focus on the Dates. They’re not all of one day. But spread over weeks!
And also this:
Imagine trading on such a market! Yeah good luck!
Conclusion
The team might not be a pure scam, but it’s NOT RELIABLE at all. They lack technical skills of handling an online bank, let alone a marketplace. They don’t have proper mindset and pattern which will ensure safety of our funds in their system. And oh, the safety of our information and the signature that they ask us to submit! It’s a big NO and STAY AWAY site in my humble opinion.
Polybius.io is an Estonia based team that claims to be a croudfunded website which aims to become a bitcoin bank (or cryptocurrency bank).
Well, they might become that too, however my review is suspicious about the site. Lets get deep into it and see the reasons what make it unreliable.
Here we will analyze the polybius.io project and see if it appears to be a scam or legit site that can be considered trusted and reliable or it’s untrustworthy and unreliable.
Note: Polybius = HashCoin = HashFlare, all are the same team and group apparently.
Review from The Financial Supervision Authority of Estonia
This is what Finantsinspektsioon has to say about Polybius.io:
The domain name was registered in 2016, yet nothing exponential has been done which is done in case of serious teams and companies
The domain was registered for one year only in may 2016, if they were serious, they would have registered it for 10 years
The domain was renewed again in may 2017 for one year only, if they were serious by now they would at least renew it for next 10 years
Now we do understand that many websites and companies don’t register or renew their websites for 10 years, but they usually don’t ask you to trust them with their payments too.
If a team is claiming to be managing such a big project, they can at least afford 150$ at once for registration of a domain for 10 years.
Evaluating the Customer Support System
When giving money to some firm or group, their customer support system is highly important. How will they respond when there is any issue and do they really care about helping the customers or not.
The support system used by polybius.io is provided by intercom.io
And the support system includes only a chatbox on right bottom or email id at the footer to send email to.
Now upon evaluating the intercom.io chat, these are my findings.
Using trial or lite version
When we start their support chat, it shows the branding of intercom.io, saying we run on intercom.io.
Which means they’re using either the trail version or else the base lite version. How can we prove that and what does it mean? Well, the proof is on intercom.io site, check the features difference between lite version and the standard version:
Intercom.io Lite version pricing
You can see that the unbranding messaging option is not available in Lite plan for intercom.io
The price for lite version is 53$ per month, for 250 users. While the pricing for the standard version is $79 per month.
Assuming that they’re a big setup as they claim, they must be having more than 250 visitors per day, so if they can afford that high for lite version, they could easily get the standard version and get rid of branding.
However, that brings us to the option that they might be using the trial version. The trial version is for 14 days only, but we can re-register for trial version using another payment method or card and we’re good to go! This is just a speculation though.
HashCoins and Polybius
HashCoins is the company or group which has started polybius project.
Both websites have the same contact cell phone number. Which means no seperate dedicated team is for these two projects.
Last tweet by HashCoins on their twitter account was on 19 Apr 2016, more than a year from now!
So if the parent company or group is so much dormant and sluggish, how can we expect their child project to be something extraordinary!
Conclusion
Polybius might not be a pure scam, but it’s not a reliable team either as their is no promising future. Their past don’t seem interesting and promising either. So in my opinion it’s better not to indulge in this project as they are at least not serious about their own project apparently.
