Plisio wants "source of funds" on a frozen invoice balance — logging it week by week

Day 27. Nothing. Checkout moved on the 8th.

Six weeks in with no movement is the point where it is worth understanding what the phrase actually means, because "source of funds" is not a thing the gateway invented to annoy you. It is a term of art and it has a procedure behind it.

Source of funds is not the same as source of wealth

They are asking a narrow question: where did this specific money come from. That is answerable with invoices and contracts and you have already answered it.

The broader question — how does this person come to have money at all — is source of wealth, and it is the one that requires bank statements and tax filings. Watch for the vocabulary shifting from the first to the second. That shift is the single most reliable indicator that a file has been passed to a different desk, and it is the point at which timelines go from weeks to quarters.

Why an Estonian operator behaves this way

The registration those gateways hold obliges them to run checks proportionate to risk, and — this is the part that catches people — the obligation is on the operator, not on you. When their own supervisor or their banking partner asks a question about a cluster of accounts, the operator's cheapest safe move is to freeze and request documents from every account in the cluster. Nothing about you triggered it in that scenario. You were adjacent to something.

This is also why you get no timeline. There genuinely may not be one on their side, because they are waiting on an answer from someone above them.

What the pattern of requests tells you

In rough order from best to worst:

1. One document request, acknowledged, then release. Automated hold, human signed it off.
2. Two or three requests all about the business, then a long silence, then release. A manual review with a queue. This is where you are.
3. Requests that move from the business to the individual — ID, proof of address, statements. The file changed hands.
4. No requests at all after the first, indefinitely. Usually an upstream instruction, and usually the operator is not permitted to tell you.

A long silence in category 2 reads as abandonment and is almost never abandonment. It is someone's queue.

The thing I am not sure about

I have never been able to establish whether chasing a stalled ticket helps or hurts. The folklore says a weekly polite chase keeps you visible; I have also watched an account get closed a fortnight after the merchant started chasing daily. I have no evidence for either and neither does anyone else who tells you confidently.

Short version: you are in the recoverable category, the silence is structural rather than personal, and the only variable worth watching is whether the questions turn from the business toward you.

"you were adjacent to something" explains about half the frozen threads on this board

Day 50, and your vocabulary test just fired.

New message wants proof of address and a bank statement showing the business account. That is the shift from funds to wealth, word for word.

I am not sending a bank statement to recover $7,810. I have said so in the ticket, politely, and offered a certificate of incorporation instead. We will see whether that is the end of it.

Holding that line is easy at 7k and impossible at 70k. Worth being honest about which one you are.

Pulled the four threads on this board where someone actually recorded dates on a held crypto balance, this one included. Small sample and three different operators, so treat it as a shape rather than a benchmark.

Case	Held	First doc request	Resolved	Outcome
A	$9,412	day 10	day 90	full, partial first
B	$2,100	day 4	day 22	full
C	$14,380	none	—	unresolved at 5 months
This	$7,810	day 6	—	day 50, open

The one that never got a document request is the one that never resolved. That is n=1 and I am aware of it, but it is consistent with what hexforge described and it is the only pattern in the data that survives contact with the sample size.

I'm the small one in that table I think, case B, and I never said thanks properly at the time so — thanks.

One thing I'd add from mine that nobody asked me about: when it released, it released to the address I'd requested originally, not to a new one I'd added while it was frozen. I'd added the new address on about day 12 out of impatience and it just ignored it. If anyone else is sitting there wondering whether to change the destination mid-review, in my one case it made no difference at all.

Sorry if that's too small a detail to be worth a post.

Day 78. Something moved, and it is not what I expected.

They have offered to release the balance, but only as a fiat transfer to a bank account in the business name. Not to the crypto address the account has used for seven months.

So the resolution on offer is: convert the account into exactly the kind of account I chose this product to avoid. Which is a clever position for them to be in, because refusing looks unreasonable from the outside and accepting means every future withdrawal has a bank on the other end of it.

That is the whole game and it is worth naming clearly.

A freeze is not primarily an attempt to keep your money. It is an attempt to move you from a relationship where they know an email address to one where they know a bank account, and the frozen balance is the leverage. Most people take the deal because the alternative is losing the money, and afterwards they describe it as "it got resolved".

You are being asked to pay $7,810 for the privilege of never being anonymous to this operator again. Whether that is a good trade depends entirely on what else runs through that identity. If the answer is nothing, take it. If the answer is anything, think harder than you want to.

"you receive crypto" right up until you actually want it

Merged a duplicate thread on the same operator into this one. Keep the ongoing cases here rather than starting a new one each week.

Day 134. Closed out, and I got the version I wanted.

I held the line on the bank transfer and kept the ticket alive with one short message a fortnight. On 27 August they came back and released the full $7,810 to the original crypto address, no fee, no explanation, and no further reference to the fiat option. Certificate of incorporation was the last document I ever sent.

Whole thing:

Date	Event
Apr 17	Withdrawal request, hosted balance
Apr 18	Source of funds requested
Apr 28	Contract requested, redacted copy sent
May 8	Checkout moved off the account
Jun 11	Bank statement requested, refused
Jul 8	Fiat-only release offered
Aug 27	Full release, original address

Four and a half months. What I would tell the version of me on day one: the hosted balance was the whole mistake and everything after it was consequence. Auto-forward has been on everywhere since May and I have not thought about a balance since.

Also, for whatever it is worth against hexforge's uncertainty — a fortnightly chase did not appear to hurt. That is one data point and it is not evidence.

When you refused the bank transfer, did the account stay open for deposits the whole time, or did that change after the refusal?

Late answer, sorry — stayed open for deposits the entire 134 days, including after the refusal. Nothing about the deposit side ever changed.

Since someone will search this thread later: the account is still open and I still have not used it. Notification email in October said the invoicing API version I was on is being retired, which is the most normal message they have ever sent me.