Is KuCoin a Scam or a Fraud?
Last year a new crypto exchange called KuCoin was launched with a very ambitious goal – to be among the top 10 crypto exchanges by 2019. The way they were operating and the high number of users they were gaining makes me look that it was achievable goal.
KuCoin looked wonderful
KuCoin platform was charging very low fee for trading and withdrawals, offering 91% of its profits to be shared with its users – 40% fee as referral commissions, 50% profits as dividends to its KCS coin and 10% of its profit to buy back & burn 50% of the KCS coins from the market. Aside this, a lot of promotions keep going on, offering goodies like a Porsche or a BMW to entice heavy traders.
I was wondering how they will earn for themselves if they keep sharing the major chunk of profits with its users. But why should I be concerned when I can get my share? So I opened my account there and invested in some KCS to see if it works as committed.
Initially, the platform felt very attractive to me. It has a very good speed, great interface, several options of tools for charts (sourced from Trading View), highest number of Market pairs I ever saw and consistent addition of new coins to their platform. I was happy to note that they were offering daily GAS on holding NEO in their wallet whereas Binance use to give GAS on a monthly basis. So I invested in Neo too on it.
Telltale signs of warning
Later I discovered that my GAS payments were missing every few days. It made me a bit furious. So I moved my NEO to Binance, immediately after the snap shot for ONT airdrop.
Unfortunately, I never got that ONT airdrop on KuCoin. I see a lot of complaints about not receiving ONT airdrop. I don’t know anyone who actually received it. After waiting for about a month, I decided to ask them in their official Telegram group for why the airdrop was delayed as Binance had delivered it the next day itself. It was the only message I sent to their official Telegram group and I was immediately blocked! It’s been two months to that incident; my account still remains blocked there.
Next I tweeted to them for clarification on the airdrop issue. I didn’t receive any response from them but thankfully, my account was not blocked on Twitter. However, I had lost all my confidence in them. How can one block their customer from their official Telegram group? Wasn’t this like Donald Trump blocking a Twitter account on his whim? It wasn’t acceptable to me. I decided to move out of this exchange and moved all my funds out of it.
Keeping away from such businesses is better to be safe
Only my KCS remained there and I was thinking to liquidate that after this quarters coin burn. But when I searched online, I found several complaints against them of coins missing from the wallet, insider jobs, non-payment of their frequent Twitter promotions, non-payment of daily KCS dividends etc. So I decided to sell out my KCS holdings at a loss and made an exit.
There is a lot of negativity surrounding this exchange online. However, it ended up booking its first quarterly profit of about $7 millions) last quarter. But this exchange is currently listed at No. 41 by volume with a less than 5K BTC volume per day. This is despite having one of the 5 largest numbers of trading pairs on its exchange. I dunno how do they maintain so many Markets with such low volumes.
Thankfully, I’m out of it! In retrospect, I thought, why was I using KuCoin when there are better exchanges which even have Steem listed on them? My mistake! I apologise to every one who used my referral code for joining KuCoin. Here is my referral invite for Huobi. Cheers! 😊 Happy trading!
- What are your experiences with KuCoin?
- Which is your preferred exchange?
Would you like to share it with me?
Thanks for sharing your thoughts about Kucoin. I don't have a personal experience with it but I have read really negative reviews about it. My favourite exchange is Bittrex and Gdax.
After having bad experiences with programs that were referral-based, I decided never to share my referral links again.
I can undestand that most referral schemes are like some ponzi scheme but imho, referral is a good, reliable and cheaper way to acquire new customers.
Even top exchanges like Binance too have a referral scheme and very recently it even doubled the referral bonus. I'm not ashamed to share my referral link for Binance. In fact, I find it less obtrusive than commercial advertising.
I guess i should stick to binance eh. I have a kucoin account but havn't used it much
binance is very good and in future binance will be the giant exchange in crypto world
and also they are planning to launch decentralized exchange
i guess binance team goal is only non stop developments
I too feel Binance to be much better than it.
Be aware about what we are prepared to dealt? there are so many suspicious scam.
I had been battling at deciding whether to stick around Kucoin or move on. It was before I could join Binance and had not heard of Huobi. The exchange platform looks great and they have many rare pair trades. Yet like you said the revenue volume is weak compare to other exchanges. I blame partially due to not many popular trading pairs. Still hard to believe their is much potential in them with all the mismanagement of users funds.
Fortunately it was coffee money. Thanks for the post and I will likely now look into Huobi. Thanks.
Glad to see you deriving some benefit out of my experiences.
Huobi was offering a 50% discount on commissions exclusively for Steemians when it listed Steem last month. Dunno if the scheme is still on, but you may find it out yourself.
How it Work You can Check Here
Thank you for the warning! I thought about investing in KuCoin. Now i know enough to not invest in this :)
Yes, we learn with each others' experiences. So I like to share mine.
Thanks for reading this blog!
Your post is the first I am hearing of the coin. I am new to crypto and appreciate your review on the coin.
Thank you! FYI, KuCoin is not a coin but the name of a crypto-exchange.
ooops ..
Regarding your airdrop, exchanges do it all the time. Its better to move coins to your own wallet before airdrop. I usually do that and then move my coins somewhere else, then claim the coins if they are actually worth something.
You're right. But I ain't a big investor and I keep my coins handy on exchanges for trading in case events like airdrop leads to an enormous price increase. Moving in and out of offline wallets seems to be a costly proposal for small investors like me. However, in case of NEO transactions are free so I should have been heeding to your advice.
Thank you for your suggestion!
I've had a Kucoin account for about a year that I rarely used. I didn't have any problems until I sent BTC from Coinbase straight to Kucoin. The Transaction was confirmed but nothing appeared in my Kucoin BTC wallet. After 6 emails & no reponse I tweeted them (I had about 3k followers at the time) After my followers jumped on the bandwagon they eventually emailed me back explaining that I had sent the BTC to an incorrect address. I have been trading for a while and know not to make silly mistakes so asked some friends to check that I wasn't going insane. I wasn't and had sent it to the correct address. All of the screenshots & correct information were sent to Kucoin and the response was something along the lines of 'You have made mistake please do not make the mistake again, sorry for your loss, case is closed.' I couldn't believe it! As soon as they sent the email they blocked me on Twitter!! Outrageous!!!
This is ridiculous! This proves them as CHEATERS! Blockchain Explorer can easily tell details of any transaction. There shouldn't be any confusion regarding that.
i dont think kucoin is a scam but it has issues. a lot of them. payouts. gas rewards. ect. btw. do you know about bibox.com? the same as kucoin but it has much more marketcap. they are much clever than kucoin. they have payouts on fridays, that means faster and more reliant exchange. my post https://steemit.com/bitcoin/@incognitoct/bibox-payout-today
Yeah, I can agree that they have issues. All new projects face some initial difficulties. But there is always a better and friendlier way to communicate the same to their customers. Blocking an investor from their communication channels isn't a sign of a legit business, imo. I'd rather classify it as a scam unless they offer a public apology with a justifiable reasoning for the same as it's just not me but many others who have faced similar treatment from their staff.
I've heard about Bibox but haven't tried it yet. Will surely look into your post.
Thank you for your input!
kucoin support is now more responsive. usually we waited for weeks to be addressed to a questions or issue.
as of bibox. the idea was. in the beginning of the week you buy bix tokens. then on fridays at approx 11h or 12h depends what time zone you are, you collect the reward for tokens and then immediately sell all of the tokens. then the price through weekend goes down, when you again buy bix tokens. in the end you have more bix as when you started, but thats just theory😀
I think KuCoin is easily the best exchange out there, I hope it goes viral very soon. also it was nice they gave away 5 free kucoins to all their users just because they had a minor technical issue. truly a people's exchange!
Good luck to you!
Yes, KuCoin keeps doing mistakes and sometimes compensate its users. But who likes it!
Remember Confido ICO scam? I liked that KuCoin took the moral responsibility to redeem its investors. But it was perhaps due to the small invested fund. It won't be always true.
Case in point, it failed to compensate for not offering the promised ONT airdrop even after 3 months. It may be because ONT rates have hiked a lot since then. I really dunno. So I better chose to stay away from it.