My attention has recently been drawn to a popular online bitcoin exchange platform that allow Nigerians to exchange bitcoin with other payment options such as iTunes, Amazon, Walmart, Target, Onevanilla and so on which are do not have any payment hosts or support in the country, customer support or recommended retail store for this payment options and are mostly meant to be payment modes in their host countries. However, Paxful has allowed these payment options to be exchanged across different restricted geographical regions and individuals without proper regulation.



For instance, iTunes gift cards, Walmart, Amazon and so on are being traded mostly by Nigerians on Paxful to buy Bitcoin and these Payment modes do not even have support/hosts in the country. Nigerians are over 60% of users and obviously the largest sellers of these gift cards on PAXFUL from which PAXFUL earns 1-5% from allowing Nigerians trade these Giftcards which passively helps to launder or trade illegally obtained funds. Moreso, most of these Payment hosts do not provide support for its customers that purchase their gift cards through Paxful or in the form of digital currencies and during dispute resolution, PAXFUL do instruct Vendors not to tell their Payment host that such Giftcard was Purchase using their medium e.g Amazon

.

The recent public outrage on social media especially on twitter shows that there are lot of Nigerian victims whose funds have been locked, seized or stolen with many of them yet to find out genuine reasons why their funds are being withheld and have expresses concern of little or no hope of recovering their funds. The Bitcoin escrow Platform is not known to be regulated by any government agencies yet lot of scam stories have been widely reported by sellers and buyers ripping each other and even PAXFUL Website illegally with-holding non-trader funds in their e-wallet for as up to two years without releasing their funds with no substantive reason.



With over 300,000 active users of Paxful website in Nigeria and the Second Largest users, PAXFUL CEO through its post on Medium.com and some other media groups that Nigerians got their gift cards through brokering and illegal means and they do not have a Clear cut solution to fixing such disputes on their platform and yet millions of dollars in these gift cards are being exchanged on their platform while enjoying 1-5% profit on each successful deal instead of restricting them.

 While some website like Localbitcoin completely disable these options, other websites like Remitano, utomarket rarely have cases or issues related to scam on its peer to peer trading platform

What is your view on this? Any opinion from any other user?



https://medium.com/the-paxful-blog/an-apology-to-paxful-customers-the-itunes-dispute-dilemma-90cc5c78a9f6



https://decryptmedia.com/6256/paxful-exchange-know-your-customer-protocols