Coingate review – Scamming Cryptocurrency payment processor
This is a review of Coingate, a payment processor for many websites that rely on it to accept various cryptocurrencies from users. We try new services ourselves before recommending them to users so we gave Coingate a try.
We wanted to move to a new hosting provider and naturally, we wanted to pay in crypto currency. We chose Hostsailor which uses Coingate to process cryptocurrency payments.
We paid using Bitcoin cash which is faster than Bitcoin as payments must be settled in half an hour. On the payment screen, we were shown a bitcoin cash address and we sent money to that address.
Since Bitcoin Cash payments are pretty fast, we closed our office and hoped to get our hosting details soon. Here are the transaction details of that payment, where you can see that payment is fully confirmed.
This is beauty of blockchain – you can see that the receipt did receive the payment. However, when we opened the Crypto Coin Daddy’s office next day, there was an email in our inbox that said “invoice overdue”. We were surprised.
We checked blockchain and it said payment was confirmed within few minutes. However, for some reason, payment link had expired.
Usually in these cases, the payment is refunded without much fuss. But, Coingate had something else up its sleeves.
We contacted them by opening a ticket and we were told that Coingate never received the payment. This was surprising. We sent them the transaction details that we mentioned earlier and said we can see it on blockchain that Coingate has infact, received the payment.
They blamed us that we might have sent it to wrong address but why would anyone do so? Why would anyone send money to an address where he or she does not have any control of?
We sent Bitcoin Cash to address which we were shown and data and time matches the time when we ordered Hostsailor’s hosting service.
One would think that we would receive our refund right? No, they started blaming us instead. This was their reply.
Jurgita (CoinGate)
Jul 29, 2020, 3:32 PM GMT+3
Hello,
The address: qplwnvcqau96zsclmyv244jt4ha7t6rr6v8xtcae6d is not associated with CoinGate order. Maybe by any chance you mistaking us with another service provider?
Kind regards,
Jurgita
CoinGate
To which we replied,
Funds were sent here qplwnvcqau96zsclmyv244jt4ha7t6rr6v8xtcae6d from my ledger bearing this address qpnnmpa3ly9m3cmgq2yy7f2lma0vtyj4xqshh0mvgw
Here is transaction address which shows that ~12 dollars were received at qplwnvcqau96zsclmyv244jt4ha7t6rr6v8xtcae6d.
Jurgita from Coingate was in no mood to help us and starting telling us that it was our mistake.
The address: qplwnvcqau96zsclmyv244jt4ha7t6rr6v8xtcae6d is not associated with CoinGate order. Maybe by any chance you mistaking with the transaction?
I located the order with you provided invoice address (#200125), however we didn’t receive any funds for that order and generated BCH address for that invoice is qq3ndjgclc02vlzjauv37y6uy6w0nnrrqs5cw9dlsn. Here you can check the confirmation, that we didn’t receive any funds to that address
At this very time, we knew what we had got ourselves into. Coingate simply gobbles up the money whenever they feel like. We were fortunate that only $12 were involved here. What if we had made a thousand dollar payment or so?
What do learn from this? Payments on blockchain are the best proofs one can get for proving that they did make the payment. However, there are crooks like Coingate that do not take blockchain as proof and can simply deny that you sent to wrong address. Avoid Coingate and do not make any crypto payment that involves Coingate.