Thank you for the write up. Its good that we document these things to help others in the future. It can be very hard to admit these things because its easy to feel embarrassed by what happened.

Adding my own story of caution. In 2021, changelly service "scammed" me out of .33 BTC. At the time that was about $9000, now its much more obviously.

A client had paid me in WBTC (he had ETH or something and didn't have Bitcoin, so he offered to pay in WBTC which I accepted). Obviously I wanted BTC, so I googled WBTC->BTC services and changelly came up.

I did a small test transaction and everything worked fine. So I sent the balance of .33 and got hit with the "We have detected a suspicious transaction" message that changelly does....

They wanted my KYC info which I initially provided (I feel stupid for doing it, I should've walked away there, but I unthinkingly assumed it was just a procedure). After the KYC info they then requested more info....they said that the "background check of my KYC info raised redflags" - at that point I started googling and saw this is a common tactic that changelly does....they require ever increasing and impossible to provide hurdles for you to jump thru.

The real comedy of changelly is that they claim they are doing this to "abide with modern KYC requirements" but they themselves are under no such jurisdiction. Changelly is some eastern european scammers - whose ownership is very opaque with no public info about them. They are registered in an ever changing set of carribean islands. That is they pretend like "we have to require this info because of regulations", but in point of fact they are under no regulatory oversight -- afterall the conversion of WBTC-BTC is just happening on a cloud server someplace. There is nothing touching regulated financial markets.

I no doubt assume that they have sold my KYC info to others in their scammer network, but overall lesson learned.