Cryptocurrency exchanges are an integral part of the crypto economy, allowing users to easily buy, sell, trade, and swap currency. Well, in theory that is. In reality, far too many of them fail to live up to their “easy” reputation. Whether they lie about trading volume, suddenly change their features and supported coins without warning, or completely close up shop overnight, an untrustworthy exchange can really interfere with your trading. Recently, Kalvin Garreth of Gozo.pro reached out to us about their experience with crypto exchange Bitibu.
The following information (and accompanying screenshots) was provided by Kalvin, and has only been lightly edited for clarity.
It all started with a deposit...
Here is the short history of our relations with Bitibu.
1. We made our first deposit in 2018, consisting of 50k EURS.
https://etherscan.io/tx/0x6209b4a8089b291788a1be1abd6d62f38e2a839912e8d1328d3bdf42d1286be1
https://etherscan.io/tx/0x4a057e059753ca8a2825695265661d6740089f1c29dc54512bc8997e59d87652
2. We made one more deposit which didn't appear in their system.
https://etherscan.io/tx/0xa44365b8aa1620f7f3034ee3f9144fbd873ad797a53cd147346bc9d408e483a0
3. But on the withdrawal screen we saw an option to withdraw 100k EURS, so we were confident that the funds were safe on our account.
4. We had no trading activity.
5. In April 2019 we decided to withdraw a part of the deposit.
6. It did not go through and they did not respond to our support requests.
7. EURS withdrawals were disabled.
8. The Bitibu website went offline for a few weeks. During this time we kept asking for a withdrawal and started our investigation. Then when the website went live again, we found our account’s trading history flooded with millions of pages of fake trades we had never executed!
9. Recently they finally allowed us to withdraw 36k EURS, before going offline again.
Conclusion
After receiving this report, I went to Bitibu’s website to see if it was down. Their homepage loads, but clicking on the “Get Started” button just causes the page to refresh. Then I thought I’d learn more about their coin by visiting the “Bitibu Coin Center”... only to discover that there’s not actually a link there, just text on their page. It’s not a good look for the exchange.
We hope that the Bitibu exchange will go live again, if only long enough for Gozo.pro to withdraw their remaining EURS. In the meantime, given the difficulty that Kalvin has reported, the suspicious pages of fake transactions, and the current state of their site, we’d recommend that those looking for a crypto exchange instead visit our Exchange List and find one with a good rating and a history of actually allowing withdrawals and responding to customer service requests.
Note: I reached out to Bitibu on July 24th 2019 and gave them the opportunity to respond to the accusations before we published the article. I have not received any response yet.