So when I decided to share my experiences with the Steemit community as I started investing in cryptocurrency (CC), I told everyone that I would be honest and share both my wins and losses, learnings and mistakes. Well in this post I am going to share one of my early mistakes. Buying bitcoins from Changelly on my credit card.
So this happened early on when I was still waiting for verification on other sites like CEX.io and Coinbase and when the market was very volatile. I wanted to have some CC to trade and speculate with so I was desperate to find a place that would take my money (Yes, I know, Desperation = You'r eabout to get taken advantage of). This is the financial equivalence of the teenage girls going into the woods in the horror movie to look for her friend that hasn't come back. I can almost hear you saying."No...Don't do it....wait to be verified."
Well being the impatient bastard that I am I decided to try out Changelly. They claimed quick and easy verification and almost immediate purchase with credit card. So I decided to make the first purchase (Which thankfully was limited to $50) and went through the normal verification hoops. This verification was a bit unique since in order to be verified immediately you had to make a video with you and your passport and credit card which would be sent to a verification team in India who verify you and release the funds from the credit card. Now to Changelly's credit they did warn me throughout the process that I was about to get screwed. Some examples: When I went to buy with my credit card they had a disclaimer that said: We know our fees are high and we are working on reducing them. Feel free to fund using an alternative method. (or something like that). Again, being the idiot I am, I clicked through thinking...how bad can they be. At the credit card verification page, it told me that the rates were high and equivalent to buying BTC at $4,000+. Now I assumed that since I was buying ETH from a CDN card that the calculation must have been off so again I just clicked through. Long story short (too late?) I paid $50USD and received $36CDN worth of eth. Ladies and Gentlemen, I will save you the time required to do the math. Here it is. $50USD to buy $36CDN of ETH = I got screwed.
Summary: Stay away folks. Just not worth it. Better to wait and deal with an exchange that doesn't practice what I consider to be highway robbery prices.