from Hacker News

Ask HN: Does this account closure from Swan Bitcoin sound reasonable?

by abendy on 2/22/21, 5:09 PM with 0 comments

~8 hours after I created a new account at Swan Bitcoin it was automatically closed for "fraudulent activity". This was a brand new account, I had no activity (trades or transfers), and I did verify my ID and connected my bank.

I contacted them and they've been nice enough and are working to restore my account. But I'm hesitant to switch.

Their technical explanation for this was that the combination of my device fingerprint and IP match previous fraud activity by 5 users. I have never used Swan before, my iPhone is a week old and my MBP is about 6 months old. I was not using my VPN that day.

"new iPhones seem to be getting picked up as a shared fingerprint now (probably something Apple has done to reduce user identification) so scammers using iPhones on this ip have created a problem for our systems as it looks like the same person on the same device"

That to me sounds like corp-speak and I'm hesitant to switch over to them. They also maintain that I was using my VPN at some point which I was not (on phone or laptop). Also, despite the below (sent by the fraud system), they seem to be able to restore everything without resubmitting everything.

"Your private information has been deleted from our systems. We have sent a request to any third parties that store such information to remove it from their systems."