Crypto Exchange Bittrex to Return the Frozen Funds of Customers From Sanctioned Regions

Cryptocurrency exchange Bittrex is reportedly looking to return the digital assets to the customers in sanction nations, as per the letter posted by an ex-Bittrex user Ziya Sadr on Twitter.

It's been a few years that @BittrexExchange disabled Iranian accounts, froze their holdings and stayed silent on the subject.
Today, I (and many others) received an email saying that they will give back the holdings, under certain conditions pic.twitter.com/3dMkdLfF2H

— Ziya Sadr (@Ziya_Sadr) November 8, 2019

According to this document, Bittrex is looking to contact past clients who have been residing in a country or region for which the crypto exchange wasn’t permitted to operate by the US Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC).

Bittrex explains in the document they filed in 2018 in which asked for permission to return frozen funds to their rightful owners.

“This application was recently granted and we are writing to let you know that you may withdraw your funds to another exchange,”

the letter further read.

However, there are a few restrictions applied to this withdrawal. In accordance with the US law, the exchange says the funds can only be withdrawn to an exchange or hosted wallet that is not located in Iran, Syria, Cuba, the Crimea Region of Ukraine, or otherwise subject to the OFAC sanction or any other US-based sanction regions.

In order to receive the funds, apart from creating an account on a cryptocurrency exchange or hosted wallet that isn’t a US sanction region, the customer needs to create an account at support.bittrex.com as well and register the Bittrex account. Now, the user has to fill all the details on the OFAC Withdraw Request.

However, if the balance in your Bittrex wallet is below the minimum withdrawal amount of the wallet, you won’t be able to withdraw. As per the Bittrex website, the minimum withdrawal for “all coins must be greater than 3 times the fee.”

The exchange also says that it will also ask for “additional identification procedures” to release the funds. Users need to follow the procedures set in place in order to retrieve their funds by March 15, 2020.

Recently, the exchange halted its trading services for 31 countries including Iraq, Somalia, Venezuela, Yemen, and Zimbabwe.