Just thought I'd post my retroactive review of BitInstant here.

Although nearly-free direct transfer from Dwolla to MtGox would have been my preferred method of transferring USD into an exchange, I decided to eat the 2% fee from Bitinstant to transfer funds from my Dwolla account to the Bitstamp exchange so that I could get started buying Bitcoin while waiting the 10+ days for my identity verification to happen on MtGox (yeah, new account approvals got really slow while the price was climbing from $18 to $28).

Every single time I transferred from Dwolla to Bitstamp using Bitinstant, I got the "Dwolla verification failed — unable to locate" error that numerous posters above have mentioned. Every single time, I emailed support@bitinstant.com. Every single time, Rachel at customer support replied within 2-4 hours of start-of-business-day (Pacific time) and manually processed the transaction.

Because of the relatively prompt (during business hours) email support, this process still turned out to be better than any of the alternatives I considered, but it was still frustrating. I'm left wondering ...

Has anyone had a successful Dwolla-to-(whatever) transfer process using Bitinstant, which didn't require manual processing of some kind? Is this location/verification issue a Dwolla problem, a Bitinstant problem, or both?