PSA: if you see a post about a CEX “scamming” a user, wait for a bit before forming an opinion

I have been on this sub for about a year now and something I’ve seen regularly is posts from users being “scammed” by Central Exchanges. I have seen posts about Binance, Coinbase, Kraken and CDC, and probably others I’ve forgotten now.

These posts are often popular, gaining a lot of traction and giving an even worse reputation to CEX. But if you stay in the comments long enough you’ll almost always find out that the user was at fault, for not following or understanding the exchange’s T&Cs. The problem is that a lot of people will see the initial post and won’t see the fact that OP was full of crap.

Just in the past hours we saw two posts about Kraken. The first one at least admitted in the title that they could be wrong but also called Kraken “greedy scumbags”, turns out they didn’t understand how the order book works. The second one wouldn’t follow the whole KYC process.

The most egregious thing about these posts is that always, OP doesn’t state the whole truth or lies. Why coming to complain here when you have to twist facts to fit your narrative? “Exposing” the CEX won’t work, Kraken is active here and often defend themselves really well. I remember seeing Binance calling out the OP for their lies once too.

There’s always the exception and sometimes CEX can be quick to restrict an account and slow to answer to the customer on how to solve it.
This is not a post praising CEX, you should always get your coins in your own custody and use the exchanges only as exchanges. But let’s take this kind of post with a pinch of salt and wait to get the whole story before drawing conclusions.

TLDR: when you see a post about a CEX scamming a user, take it with a pinch of salt because there’s a big chance OP is the one to blame in the story.