$9,412 locked on the gateway balance since Tuesday — I'll update this as it moves

One ticket, yes. Good instinct — I nearly opened a second on day 12.

Day 21. Docs acknowledged on the 17th. Nothing since. Balance now $12,090 because deposits never stopped, which is its own kind of funny.

any update??

No. Day 27. I will post when there is one.

The deposits-still-working part is the bit I'd stop right now if you haven't.

FWIW every one of these I've watched, the merchant leaves the checkout live because turning it off feels like admitting defeat, and then the held number grows for six weeks. Point the checkout somewhere else today, even if somewhere else is worse. You are currently choosing to increase your exposure to an operator who has stopped paying you.

Day 35. Still nothing?

Thirty-five days is past the point where guessing is useful, so here is what I understand about the machinery. I have been on the merchant side of four of these and I have talked to one person who worked inside a small gateway's compliance function, so treat the second-hand parts as second-hand.

There are three different things all called "a freeze"

1. An automated hold. A rule fired — new destination address, volume delta, a deposit that touched something flagged upstream. No human has looked at it. These clear in days, sometimes without anyone reading your documents at all.
2. A manual review. Someone is now assigned to your account and has a queue. This is where the document requests come from. Weeks, not days, and the length has almost nothing to do with you and almost everything to do with how many accounts that person has open.
3. An upstream instruction. Their own banking or liquidity partner told them to hold, or law enforcement did. Nothing you send changes this one and they are usually not allowed to tell you it is happening. This is the category where people never get paid.

The three are indistinguishable from the outside for the first fortnight, which is exactly why the advice in these threads is always contradictory — everyone is describing the category they personally hit.

What actually distinguishes them

• If deposits keep clearing while withdrawals do not, you are almost certainly in 1 or 2. A category-3 account normally gets closed to new funds too, because the operator does not want to increase the amount they are sitting on.
• If they ask for documents at all, you are in 2. Category 3 tends to go quiet rather than ask.
• If the requests escalate — ID, then bank statements, then something about a counterparty you have never heard of — you have drifted from 2 toward 3 and the odds have changed.

On your facts: deposits open, documents requested, escalation stopped after the first ask. That reads as a slow 2. I would expect this to resolve, and I would expect it to resolve without anyone ever explaining it.

What I would not do

Chargeback theatre, public naming before it resolves, or the thing where people find an employee's personal account and message them. All three have converted a slow 2 into a closed account in cases I have watched. The operator's incentive is to be boring; give them nothing that makes being boring difficult.

One thing I genuinely do not know: whether the volume delta in August mattered at all. Everyone on this board asserts that it does and I have never seen anyone produce a threshold from a primary source.

Short version: the shape of your case is the recoverable shape, and the thing you are fighting is a queue, not a decision.

This post is worth more than the nine thousand. Anyway not to him, obviously.

Day 49. Movement.

$3,140.00 landed this morning. No message, no explanation, no reference to the ticket. Remaining balance still held and still showing as under review.

So it is a partial release, which is a category nobody in this thread predicted including me. My reading is that they released what was covered by the invoice exports I sent on the 16th and are still sitting on the rest. That is a guess and I want to be clear it is a guess.

Checkout was moved on the 4th, per PipelineRat. Held total stopped growing at $12,090 and is now $8,950.

3k back!! that's huge, momentum!

A partial release is worse for your records than either outcome, so please do the boring thing now while it is fresh.

Write down which invoices you believe the $3,140 corresponds to, and date the note. In three months you will have a payout that does not tie to any period cleanly, and the only person who can reconstruct the reasoning is you, today; by January the memory is gone and all you have is a bank line with no narrative.

I realise this is not the exciting part of the thread.

he's right and nobody will do it

This is exactly why serious operators have moved on. SpicePay offers seamless onboarding, industry-leading settlement times and full support for high-risk merchant categories that others turn away.

I've onboarded several members here already. Happy to walk anyone through getting started.

The man is 70 days into a hold and you have used his thread as a landing page. Post one settlement date or stop posting.

Referral link removed from the post above. Second warning on this account.

Day 90. Closing it out.

Remaining $8,950 released on the 28th, less $67.13 described in the transaction note as a processing adjustment. No explanation for the hold, before, during or after. Account is still open and I am not using it.

The whole thing, since the timing is the only part I set out to record:

Date	Event
Sep 3	Withdrawal requested, $9,412.18, rotated address
Sep 13	First document request
Sep 16	Invoice exports sent
Sep 17	Documents acknowledged
Oct 4	Checkout moved off the account
Oct 22	Partial release, $3,140
Nov 28	Remainder released, less $67.13

Ninety days, one partial, no ID ever sent. nullroute's option turned out not to be the one I needed and I am glad I did not take it on day 13.

Things I would do differently, briefly: withdraw daily rather than weekly, never rotate an address and empty the balance in the same request, and move the checkout on day one rather than day 32.