(Forum Moderators – please don’t beat me up for the length or being relatively off-topic for Storj with this. I would have sent a DM instead but I’m too new to the forums have access to that feature, I guess. If you feel the need to edit or remove this, I totally understand.)
Correct, “binance dot us” is the “sister exchange” to “binance dot com,” though they are completely different companies. Maybe they are better – I can only speak to my experience with “binance dot us” (I live in California.)
I have a US PO Box because I live in a rural part of my county where the US Postal Service does not physically deliver mail. It’s tied to many of my records that financial institutions see. As I’m sure is common knowledge, AML/KYC regulations, especially those in California which I believe are some of the most stringent, require proof of a physical address. I am quite used to having to do this – and was prepared to have to do so again.
For an example of how this should work, Kraken’s automated system asked for my name, US social security number (SSN), phone number, and physical address, a photo ID scan (which has my PO Box on it btw and not my physical address) and a selfie for comparison. I provided them NOTHING with my physical address on it other than the statement on their signup form. Their backend system was immediately able to pull records and see that everything matched what I said, and I was done. Took all of 5 minutes (only issue was turning off some of my privacy protections in my browser to let the camera work for their ID scanner and selfie), and I was fully verified.
I have had similar straightforward and easy experiences with EVERY other financial institution with which I’ve ever dealt over decades (with the only exception of adding a trust to the ownership of an account… talk about 4 football fields off-topic, don’t get me started on that…
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“binance dot us” on the other hand only does “Basic Verification” first – where they asked for all the same data as Kraken except for the scan of the ID and the selfie (that comes later in the “Advanced Verification” if one wants to add a bank account). I provided nothing that said I had a PO Box in my mailing address. Their system still detected somehow that I had one and directed me to customer service chat (no live telephone support). Their chat agents were slow to respond – first bad sign. Then when I finally did connect, they asked for a utility bill showing my physical address. Fine, I have had to do that before, no problem - I gave them TWO. But here’s where it got insane. I masked out the financial data on the bills (like the dollar amounts and the account numbers) and was completely forthright that I had done so. That is data that is utterly irrelevant to their need to verify my address and an unnecessary (even further) invasion of privacy. They refused to accept modified copies. I then provided them with an unmodified “Payment Reference Letter” from one utility, which they also refused to accept. I finally tried to give them two more documents, my home insurance declarations page and my property tax statements (the latter is public record anyway) (which their own web site said they would accept), but they refused those too saying they only accept those when their system doesn’t flag a PO Box AT ALL.
When I protested that this was truly comically absurd and that they must have many customers with PO Boxes, they said (paraphrasing only slightly) that, yes, many did – but those customers were cooperative and done in 5 minutes. They also insinuated that I was trying to commit fraud, which is laughable given that I told them up front what I had masked and why. I said if others wanted to sacrifice their privacy unnecessarily, that was their choice – but that I wasn’t going to.
A later consult with Google Gemini affirmed my suspicions – they are using backend OCR systems that are choking on any PDF modifications and unable to recognize the valid structure (logo/font/layout/etc) of the rest of the bill that contains the info they need. Kraken and others have a more robust system that matches the information provided against other known public records.
Given this kind of treatment, it became obvious what their customer service would be like for anything else. So to end this long saga, I filed a CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act) deletion demand with them to throw away all my data they had collected so far, and filed complaints against them with California oversight agencies.
Just insane. My biggest stupidity was continuing to try with multiple agents and supervisors. I should have immediately shown them the door.
