I placed a trade to sell BTC using Bisq. However, the buyer has been taking long to pay. The buyer later shifted the trade to paid status.
BISQ support closed the trade without asking for any kind of evidence from any of the parties the buyer now has my BTC and there is no deposit in my account. Why would support close out the trade and blindly assume I received payment when i did not? Seems very incompetent. I have done a few trades on BISQ but really not pleased with the above experience.
Contacted the buyer. He provided a screenshot and I noticed the error he made in typing in the email. He resent the deposit and I have now received it.
However, this could not have been the case. He could have simply walked away since he got the BTC and still had his cash. Bisq support needs to wait for input from both parties before closing a trade going forward unless you want to be held accountable for losses when dealing with payments that are not reversible like Bitcoin.
I am quite confused by this post, many edits and deletion of posts. @Trader13 care to clarify what has happened here? I am quite confused by this.
I don’t really know what happened here, but I have a theory that you (the seller) open a dispute before the max trade period was over, but not due to a bug or any other problem, just that you perhaps felt uneasy waiting for the trade to finish. Is this maybe correct?
If not, could you please explain to us so we know what actually happened here?
Just made my updates in the original post. The following occurred.
I placed a trade to sell on Bisq
Someone accepted the trade. But did not make payment until more than 5 -6 hours
I then opened a ticket to inquiry how to go about blocking a trader from evening seeing my trades since I would prefer not to trade with someone that just takes an order off the orderbook and sits on it before making payment.
He then said he made payment and update the status to payment sent
Reached out to him but no payment had been received by my bank
Woke up to find that the trade is closed by Support without my instructions and said i violated sending opening a support ticket. Support claimed he provided proof that the bank sent the funds which was not true since the screenshot he sent me said pending. Support lied and closed the ticket without my input
I am now pissed since I did not receive the bank deposit and the buyer now has my BTC plus my security deposit
Came and posted on Bisq while also emailing the buyer to ask him to not scam me as he provided his details
He sent a screenshot saying that Zelle is having problems with the information provided.
I then replied that email in the screenshot has a a typo and he should update it to match the information in Bisq or the email below
User corrected the email and resent the payment
Happy ending.
However, this could have went very differently as the buyer was not obligated to deposit any funds in my account as it was closed successfully by support.
Support agents should not be allowed to close trades and take various actions when they are not arbitrators. I have done over 16 trades on Bisq and was quite pleased but this last experience was a little scary. The support agent did not do enough due diligence before closing my ticket and sending the BTC to the buyer.
In my case i got lucky that the buyer was honest and he made a mistake in typing in the payment information and decided to resend
I was the arbitrator here, and I’ll readily admit that I should have waited for your explicit acknowledgement of receipt of the buyer’s payment. This is in fact the first case I have ever closed prior to receiving express written acknowledgement of receipt from the seller (except in cases where the seller was not responsive at all).
The situation that led me to close this trade as I did is worth explaining.
@Trader13, you opened this dispute to discuss your desire for a feature to be implemented in Bisq. As I mentioned in the arbitration chat, this is a protocol violation. It is unfair to your counterparty to take a trade to arbitration for any reason other than a problem with the trade itself.
You opened the dispute before the trading window was actually complete. This is also a protocol violation. Buyers have until the end of the trading window to complete their payment to you. By definition, they have not “taken too long” as long as they complete payment within the window.
You had originally said in your opening chat messages “you can close the ticket”. I took this to mean that you had in fact already received the buyer’s payment and are OK with the BTC trade amount being released. I took this to mean that you were simply opening the ticket after the fact of receipt to make the point that you would like a blacklist feature to be implemented. This may have been a reasonable assumption, but it falls below our standards for arbitrators. We should never work on assumptions, and should rather always ask for explicit confirmation where there can be any doubt. I will endeavor to make my first error of this kind also my last.
The buyer got back to me in the meantime with a transcript of the support conversation he had with his bank. I had not solicited this proof in any way from the buyer, he provided it on his own. Given the combination of the facts that you opened the ticket prematurely, and for reasons unrelated to the trade itself, that I believed you already received the payment because you had told me to go ahead with closing the ticket, and the fact that the buyer was showing no red flags and indeed being quite proactive about resolving the situation, I made the choice to close the ticket out straight away.
I do not believe I was unreasonable in my actions, but again they have fallen short of one of the standards that Bisq arbitrators must hold ourselves to: that we get explicit acknowledgement of receipt of funds from the seller before closing a ticket out. When we fail to do this, we run the risk of creating the kind of chaos, upset, and frustration just as we’ve seen here.
Our standard operating procedure is to give parties 48 hours to respond an arbitration message before closing a dispute due to non-responsiveness. Here, I only allowed you 6 hours to respond before I took action for all the reasons above. In the future, I will wait longer in order to avoid this kind of situation.
For posterity, I’m including the full text of my comments in this dispute. They reveal no further information about the traders or the trade than what has already been divulged above. @Trader13, I’ve omitted your original chat messages as I have not asked you permission to include them.
I hope this provides a satisfactory response for you, @Trader13. Thank you for taking the time to reach out here. This has been a good example of responsibly reporting an arbitration complaint.
Thank you for your professionalism. I had not read the rules and figured I could submit feedback via support ticket. Did not know it served the same function as the arbitrator. In the end it appears the traders on Bisq are honest people and he corrected the email error he made and sent me the payment.
Bisq has a lot of potential and I will continue to use it. Once a mobile app is present then Bisq growth will rocket since it is a slight inconvenience to only have the desktop app currently. But great work overall.
Now that you say it, a mobile App might actually make sense!
A while ago, when I started using Bisq there weren’t many offers so I often created my own ones and then had to let the computer run for a few hours with the App open, which led me to believe that a mobile App doesn’t make a lot of sense as the phone is usually in stand-by.
But at the moment, and definitely more in the future, there are usually enough open offers so as a taker, being online for just a few minutes to take an offer and to send the payment, would be enough and possible on mobile!
I wonder if there are already plans for that? @ManfredKarrer ?
Also when mobile apps can have certain tasks that run in the background. You will not need to have the app open. You simply place your offers an continue using your phone as normal. Once your offer is accepted you get a notification and can open the app.
A native mobile app is the way to go for Bisq if they expect to get more mainstream adoption. I think it is imperative that it is added to the roadmap if that is not planned seriously. The current desktop app is good enough and additional efforts can be directed to getting mobile apps developed imho
