Bitstamp.net Review 2021 – Scam or not?
Bistamp is one of the most reliable Bitcoin exchanges nowadays. The platform was founded as a European alternative to then-dominant cryptocurrency exchange Mt. Gox and provides secure and reliable service to their customers since 2011. The company was founded by Damijan Merlak and Nejc Kodrič in their native Slovenia, but in April of 2013 moved to the UK, then to Luxembourg in 2016.
Review Contents
- Verification at Bitstamp
- Fees
- Bitstamp.com Trading
- Ease of Use
- Customer Support
- Exchange Security
- Supported Payment Methods
- Supported Countries
- Conclusion
This cryptocurrency exchange is well-connected in the industry. They work together with Coinbase, one of the most popular BTC exchanges. The company has also attracted significant investment from Pantera Capital, one of the biggest Bitcoin-specific venture capital investors, owned partly by Benchmark, Ribbit Capital, and Fortress Investment Group.
Verification at Bitstamp
Verification process usually takes about 2 hours, if you have all the necessary documents. You can verify identity by submitting scanned image of your passport, national ID or driver’s license together with the proof of residency. All you need to know is explained in this short video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGGzVpk2ZNw
The verification itself doesn’t affect the amount of money you can trade, but deposits and withdrawals are not possible with an unverified account.
Bitstamp currently accepts just two fiat currencies – US dollars and European Euro. When it comes to cryptocurrencies, they support BTC and Ripple, but Ripple trading is something that we would not recommend due to extremely high fees. Bitcoin trading is the main feature of Bitstamp, and it works as a user-to-user trade, while Ripple trading is conducted directly, user-to-Bitstamp with an unfavorable exchange rate.
Fees at Bitstamp.com
The trading platform supports wire transfers and the following fees apply:
International Wire deposits carry 0.05 percent Bitstamp fee with a minimum of 7.5 USD/EUR and it takes 2-5 business days to be completed.
International Wire withdrawals carry 0.09 percent Bitstamp fee with a minimum of 15.00 USD/EUR. The minimum amount for international wire withdrawals is 50.00 USD/EUR, and it takes 2-5 business days to be completed.
When it comes to Bitcoin trading fees, Bitstamp starts a bit high with 0.25 percent for a monthly volume lower than $20.000. The percentage drops as the volume increases; all the way to 0.10 percent for a monthly volume over $20 million.
USD/EUR trades have a flat fee of 0.20 percent. You can see the detailed fee schedule here – https://www.bitstamp.net/fee_schedule/
The minimum trading amount is currently $5. Previously the minimum trading amount was $0.86, but the exchange had to increase the limit due to customer complaints. Customers complained that they are paying five times higher fees on the smaller trading amounts due to the Bitstamp’s rounding policy.
Bitstamp.com Trading
Bitstamp allows users to execute instant orders at the best bid currently available, to ask price as well as to place limit orders.
Instant Order on Bitstamp
Buying of Bitcoins is available to businesses and individuals 24/7 through the Tradeview interface and a well-documented API. The API gives users complete access to their accounts, as well as a quick way to analyze the public book and ticket information.
Limit order on Bitstamp
The company also has mobile apps for both Android and iOS, which allow easy trading on the go.
The exchange does not support trading of derivate and futures. Altcoins and margin trading services are not supported too.
Ease of Use
The website’s interface looks simple and clean. It’s very easy to find your way around even if you are the first-time visitor. Bitstamp also has one of the best live trading view interfaces and a great Fiat/BTC graphs. You can learn how to use the Tradeview interface here.
Bitstamp Tradeview
Customer Support at Bitstamp.com
Bitstamp’s customer support typically responds within an hour and they are ready to go an extra mile to help resolve user’s issues. They have earned the respect of many users by giving honest replies to support tickets and working overtime as well as hiring additional staff to handle the workload in times of need. More than decent support – everyone loves them, including us.
There are no scam reports on the Web found but in our comment section below there are a couple of negative reviews in the recent past.
Bitstamp Graph
Bitstamp´s Security
The trading platform keeps the security pretty basic. It offers two-factor authentication that connects a user’s account to a mobile device, and a password, which needs to be changed every 90 days.
When it comes to privacy, the cryptocurrency exchange is very good at guarding it. They are transparent about the information collected, how the website uses that information and how they use cookies.
Bitstamp is very committed to money laundering prevention too. Since the governments have not regulated the BTC exchanges, Bitstamp has created a set of their own rules which they follow in order to prevent any shady financial practices on their platform.
The exchange was last time hacked in January of 2015, and the crooks have stolen up to 19,000BTC. More info can be found in this Reddit discussion.
After the hack, company decided to rebuild the platform entirely in order to restore the trust of the clients. The exchange guaranteed the safety of the funds before the hack and stated the following:
“This breach represents a small fraction of Bitstamp’s total bitcoin reserves, the overwhelming majority of which are held in secure offline cold storage systems. We would like to reassure all Bitstamp customers that their balances held prior to our temporary suspension of services will not be affected and will be honored in full.“
Bitstamp stores 98 percent of all coins in cold wallets, keeping the customer’s funds offline in secure vaults. The remaining 2 percent are held for a live trading on the exchange.
The interesting fact is that the Bitstamp was the first major trading platform to incorporate the best security practices in the industry such as a fully insured cold-storage, two-factor authentication and mandatory confirmation emails in order to increase the security of the users.
The company has email and SMS alerts, and they use PGP (Pretty-Good-Privacy) data encryption for authentication of the uploaded files and privacy protection.
Supported Payment Methods
Supported Countries
Bitstamp welcomes users from all over the world excluding Washington State and Hawai in the USA.
Bitstamp Review Conclusion:
Bitstamp is one of the most reliable cryptocurrency exchanges out there, with a high daily volume and excellent connections in the industry.
Pros
- Good reputation
- High volume and liquidity
- Connections in the industry grant it additional legitimacy
- Easy to use and quick
Cons
- High Trading Fees if you are trading lower volumes
- More negative comments in the recent past
If you are based in Europe, this definitely an exchange you should consider using. Having questions? Feel free to post them in the comments.
We would love to hear from you.
Go to bitstamp.com
Bitstamp = Bitscam. You are warned…Tons of people have already lost money, including me. I was a customer for five years. When you least expect …
This 4 star review on Bitstamp is NOT ALL REALISTIC ANYMORE!! ZERO STARS FOR BITSTAMP! LOOK AT ALL THE SCAM-COMMENTS BELOW!
They obviously have decided to start scamming people! There are LOTS of comments of people being scammed on Reddit and so on. Their company deserves to be run into the ground. Get your money out of Bitstamp or you will lose it when you least expect!
They are a bunch of crooks! If you value your money stay away from them like from the plague, or I guess from Corona to be more modern. I did some trading over a German company who unfortunately signed me up to Bitstamp. Eventually I wanted to be paid out. For that I had to pay in 10% in taxes and charges so that the German finance office clears the money (ie so that I won’t be suspected of laundering money. I did and expected my money on my account. In comes a call from some British dude from Bitstamp, informing me that he is and I quote „proud“ to have stopped the transfer of my money to my account, because of a suspicion of money laundering. In vain I tried to explain to him that the fees to the finance office were paid, wich he just ignored instead suggesting that I pay yet another 60000 Euros to Bitstamp and THEN withdraw all of it… er right!!!! And next I‘ll pay Santa Claus 100000 so he introduces me to Mickey Mouse! Stay away from Bitstamp, don’t make the same mistake I made!
If you are based in Europe, this definitely an exchange you should consider using.
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Quite opposite.
Exchange itself and customers data-funds are controlled by US based entities – meaning it is totally Unsafe.
You can tell that immediately after review terms and conditions – everything heavily skewed, you just a slave to corporation.
If you are European, better look elsewhere.
Bitstamp just terminated my account that I’ve held for over 2 years (11/4/2019). Their reason was stated that I violated their “Terms of Agreement” policy. I only use Bitstamp for selling XRP coins that I store on a “Nano S” ledger & withdraw to my bank account when I need extra money. I just sold $30,000 worth and tried to withdraw the money when they denied my withdrawal & terminated my account. I need the money for end-of-the-year expenses & have no idea how to get it now. Bitstamp is a SCAM…Beware!
I am open to share my experience and to also enlighten everyone on how nicholasatrium at tuta, io was able to recover my money from Bitstamp after several attempts to reach them.
I dont recommend bitstamp to anybody they will not let me withdraw my money to my bank account they keep rejecting it because they say I have the wrong routing number to my bank but when I can they say do know any of my information and they have not gave me a clear answer how to get my money bitstamp sucks
Terrible customer service and not secure at all. I had all my money stolen within 4 months of opening account and when I told them and asked for helped they told me basically “We don’t know what happened, call the police and hire a computer expert to teach me how to make my computer more secure”
Not simply bad as far as a business but this is major lawsuit territory and they do not care at all because they are illegitimate and borderline legal. I had a very large amount of money stolen from me and will never get it back purely because of this “business” that charges you to use their site to get your money stolen off of.
DO NOT PUT MONEY ON THIS PLATFORM UNLESS YOU WANT IT ALL STOLEN WITH NO OPTIONS TO GET IT BACK.
I tried cashing $1400 out of my account and have been getting the run around for over a month. Do not use bitstamp it is a scam
They refuse to sell your currency to USD. They refused to reimburse to a USA bank. They want a signed letter from your USA bank saying that they can sell crypto and convert to USD to deposit in your bank. GOOD LUCK with that hassle.
As few other reviewers, my account has been terminated without any reason or prior notice, reason claimed is some vague “internal policies”.
The amount of fees I payed them is far well in 5-digits and my money is still with them with almost non-existent communication so far.
Avoid this exchange if you don’t want to have similar experience.
Even if they won’t terminate your account, you are guaranteed to get a ton of pervasive questions once you attempt to withdraw your money.
Was the reviewer paid to write about them….this company has not deposited money that belongs to hundreds of people and they fondly hope that no one will do anything. If you are like us and have uncredited BCH for BTC held by Bitstamp, go to http://www.bitstampclassaction.com.
I would not recommend this one! it was ok so i thought until they decided to hit my credit card without my permission for 1000.00 dollars and you can forget about trying to get them to take care of it, had to get my bank to dispute the charge, I took all my coins out, read the other reviews before hand like i did not until now.
totally screwed, unable to handle the demand, accumulate tickets for deposits held in limbo etc.
Missing AUD $40,000 not credited to account they are a PONZI have reported to Europol as fraud i encourage anyone else to do the same
https://www.europol.europa.eu/report-a-crime/report-cybercrime-online
Support does not respond within 1 day. Typically it’s a week later, or not at all. I’ve been trying for weeks to transfer my money to my personal account with no success and almost zero customer support. No phone number. I’m starting to think Bitstamp may be in financial trouble or at worst a Ponzi scheme.
I sent money to them 4 weeks ago, still not credited, WTF? This company is a scan! How the hell did it get a 4 star review?
These bitstamp assholes got my money and never heard from them again. There’s no customer service line (is some kind of Google voice). Be careful!
Don’t send money to them or you will loose it.
Bitstamp is not reliable and is acting as a scam and fraud.
You should try to visit Google and type Bitstamp scam fraud and read how many people have problems.
I opened an account early December. The verification took about one week. I made $10k wire transfer last Friday using a company name. Two days later i got a message saying that funds can not be accepted because the name on the account is different than the name of the sender and that more documents are needed to verify. I asked them to send funds back to sender which they listed as one option. It has been there days and no answer. After reading these I might be waiting few weeks! Did anyone recover funds from them and if so, how long did it take? If I do not get my money I am planning to reach out to the media in the US and Europe and also the police to make sure they are flagged and stopped if needed.