Just avoid this exchange, there are many more professional alternatives nowadays. Not only their kyc/aml efforts are way overboard and borderline illegal privacy crushing but their staff clearly shows undertraining and a general complete cluelessness about what they are doing and in which field they are operating.

My personal experience: I've worked as an otc exchanger for a while and stopped my activities some 4 years ago, never used my Bitstamp account since then. Suddenly out of nowhere their support contacted me asking for some impossible to get and above all totally irrelevant information from an aml point of view (as it would prove nothing anyway). I provided what I could and the issue seemed to be solved, only for them to contact me again 5 months later (account still never used meanwhile) with the same exact requests as if the previous ones didn't take place. I gave them the same answers with the information I could gather and after weeks of more time wasted for nothing (I was answering more as a matter of principle than anything at this point) the account was finally terminated. Luckyly I held no funds with them whatsoever.

More in detail, I was asked for:

- various up to date ids and bank statements: reasonable request, I complied.

- "proof" of the sources of funds I transacted with them: impossible information to gather since I was just transacting mostly p2p and I'm not some governative agency with the power to track down every individual I transacted with and compelling them to send me full documentation about their financial lives, obviously, nor I'd have the time or the will to do such a thing. Some of the funds were my personal savings I bought some btc with for personal long term investment and I didn't have such old bank statements available, also because I changed banks overtime. Also it would have proved nothing aml-wise anyway since those few personal funds in fiat I bought the crypto with back in 2013 or so could have been ill gotten with no way to tell from a bank statement. I explained them all this.

- they answered asking me to provide my bitcoin wallets WITH IBAN, ADDRESS, NAME and such clearly visible. Yes you read it well: bitcoin wallets with iban, name, address. They don't know what they are doing: my best guess is they tried to bolster their aml department picking some random ex bank employee, without educating them about the crypto field, and this is the result. I practically laughed at them, tried to clean up the intellectual mess they are in a bit and provided a few of my recently used addresses (obviously without ibans...). Provided some screens of my recent transaction on my current bank account (daily expenses for low amounts), just to give them a useless iban since they were asking for it so insistently.

As I said this whole useless, embarassing and time wasting procedure was repeated twice with a 5 month gap, and in the end the account was terminated. Now the problem is not they are trying to comply with strict regulations, I can understand that. The problem is they clearly don't know what they are doing, ask for information which not only is impossible to provide in most cases (people don't plan their financial life 10 years in advance predicting the future braindead requests of some random minor crypto business and keeping all the possible documentation accordingly, I'm sorry) but mostly doesn't even make sense (btc wallets with ibans!) or is relevant in any way for aml (bank statements documenting some prehistoric wire transfers to some likely defunct exchange for a few bucks to buy some btc valued $ 100 at the time. As if this could rule out illicit source of funds).
Aml protocols require a much more balanced (and sensible) approach or it's just useless harassment and a waste of time for both parties.

ghibly79

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