Crypto 101: Winklevoss/Gemini shadiness - write up

Oh, man. What a week. Hey, what's up, guys?

This is the write up that accompanies the video I posted about my recent experience with the Gemini Exchange. I was doing something a little different during the video. I was still out of power at my house so I was trying to fill everyone in on what was happening prior to me leaving for the weekend. Plus I had a lot scheduled that week, and this current week. Doing the live video was the best way for me to update everyone, considering I couldn't use my normal setup at home.

So I'm gonna jump right into it. Some of you have probably seen my tweet and my whole debacle where I posted what was going on with Gemini. Basically, we're all human and we make mistakes. And it was definitely my fault for leaving crypto on an exchange. But the backstory basically is I am saving to go to Germany and I had earned some ETH and a very small amount of Bitcoin through doing some interviews and just trading and flipping stuff.

I had put it on Gemini about two or three months ago in the event that ETH went up-- I told myself if it got to like $900 again I would cash out. And basically what happened was it didn't, right? We all know that. So the price dropped, and I left it on there because I thought that it was reputable enough and I'm like, "You know what , this isn't as high risk as leaving something on Bittrex or maybe Binance."

Well, I go to sign in and out of nowhere it just says, "The account associated with this email is closed," and, "If you think this was done in error, please contact customer service." So immediately I'm in a panic and I try to Google their customer service number. The customer service number is quite literally a recording of them saying, "Please put in a customer service ticket."

I'm like, "Okay." So I put in a Customer Service ticket and at that point, I'm just really freaking out because I'm like, "Okay, this is not good. I can't get a hold of anybody. I don't really know what to do." So the first thing I did, obviously, was I went to Reddit and I posted, "This seems to be happening a lot, account closed, no warning and I had funds on the site." I say this seems to be happening a lot because I went on the Gemini Subreddit and there was like five or six posts of this happening.

The scary part was people were getting emails in response saying things like basically, "We don't have to give you any rhyme or reason as to why we closed the account, we apologize for the inconvenience," so on and so forth. Some people were getting getting an email saying you have five days to take your crypto off the site and some people weren't. It was just literally up and gone.

I was talking to the CryptoBasic guys, and they said it probably has a lot to do with the fact that there's been changes in their KYC requirements because I had made a Gemini account months and months ago, maybe even a year ago at this point. And at that time I don't think they required very much for you to make an account. And so Mike had said he thinks it was probably the fact that they wanted me to give them more identification, which was fine. I have no problem doing that, I'm gonna pay my taxes, I'm gonna do everything legally. I have no problem being honest about that kind of stuff. But I didn't get the email. I didn't get the opportunity to do that and it felt unfair.

Meanwhile, the Reddit post still hadn't turned up any insights after a minute or two, which is about how long my patience is, and I tweeted. "Any reason you closed my account with a balance without any warning or email? I have emailed customer service support." So low and behold they respond almost instantaneously. "Please DM us with an email address associated with your Gemini account." I'm like, "Okay, well your Twitter account doesn't allow for direct messaging." So they end up DMing me and they say, "Hey, there. Could we have your email address? We'll take a look what happened." Which was then followed by, "thanks for reaching out. We've received your email and escalated the issue to the compliance team. You will receive a message fro them shortly."

Literally like two minutes later I get an email that says that email that everybody was posting on Reddit, "You have five days to get your crypto off." So I asked, "Is there any explanation as to why you're closing the account?" Their response was literally, "Our account review process is confidential so we are unable to elaborate as to how our why accounts are closed on our exchange. Users are notified when their accounts are closed so we're not sure why the email sent to your address was not received."

But I wasn't the only one-- and it's so so unrealistic to think that they can do that. It's not fair. Meanwhile this is all the more reason why we're all screaming about decentralized exchanges like the Blocknet. And this is why people are always talking about how important decentralization is because fundamentally what it comes down to is in this situation is that we have no control over centralized exchange. Thankfully Gemini has a lot to lose as well as the Winklevoss twins, because they need to at least attempt to save face in these situations.

Gemini was just recently approved to have Zcash on their site and they're clearly making changes to their exchange to make it last longer or live longer. But treating your customers or clientele like this, with no rhyme or reason, no explanation. Nothing. Just closing accounts is ridiculous. How can you not explain to somebody why the account is closing? Why don't you give them an opportunity to try to fulfill whatever requirements that are necessary? At the very least make sure everyone is getting this 5 day warning email. I understand if requirements change and all of a sudden they're in hot water that would be one thing, but out of nowhere. Nothing. Just closing accounts is ridiculous.

I assume because I have a small social media presence that they wanted to have the station handled because I called them out publicly. But what about the average person stuck in this situation, just waiting, because Gemini has no incentive to move quickly to resolve the situation?

To make matters clear, Gemini did give me the opportunity to get my funds of their site and the issue is resolved. But they never explained to me why, nor does it seem have they resolved the issues with everyone on reddit.

So everybody be aware get your money off that exchange. Don't leave it there. It's been a full about a month and a half of posts on Reddit of people saying that the accounts are getting closed. Anyway, that's the end of rant. Everyone be careful out there!

Here is the video I made where I cover all of this:

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