Cannot Withdraw From Huobi Exchange? Be Careful

If you're having difficulty withdrawing funds from Huobi, a Chinese crypto exchange, you're not alone. As of March 2018, it's exceedingly challenging to transfer or remove funds to another exchange (such as Binance) or wallet. It's raising suspicions that Huobi is intentionally putting barriers that prevent investors from accessing their digital money, resulting in funds getting trapped inside the platform.

And it's tough to resolve the many issues that inevitably arise. The exchange's help desk is very busy, to a point where customer support has become unresponsive. The live chat takes 10 to 30 minutes to respond. In terms of user experience, Huobi is a labyrinth that forces you to jump through complex hoops to accomplish basic tasks.

There are other red flags. Japan's SBI Group recently cancelled a partnership due to security concerns with Huobi platform. And this study alleges that Huobi fakes its trading volume apparently to give the impression of more trading activity than what actually takes place.

Here are serious issues with Huobi that can make your deposits inaccessible and/or illiquid:

1. The exchange requires multiple ID verifications before you can withdraw a meaningful amount of digital money. After I passed verification (driver's license and dated selfie), they limited my daily withdrawal to 2.5 ETH or 0.1 BTC until I passed another verification (passport). Huobi implemented a second verification step without sending an announcement to users.
2. Huobi staff must approve your withdrawal. Therefore, you own your funds but you must request to access and withdraw it. I have accounts on a dozen crypto exchanges but Huobi is the only exchange that I know of that requires investors to seek approval for withdrawing. It's an unreasonable burden. Do you need your bank manager's permission to get cash from the ATM?
3. Without multiple ID verifications, your daily withdrawal limits are extremely low (see #1), which essentially traps your digital money inside Huobi.
4. The lack of responsiveness from help desk makes dispute resolution extremely hard. If the crypto market loses significant value, your funds could get wiped out.

Huobi seems like an attractive crypto exchange with which to do business. That's because they list new coins or tokens such as Theta (THETA) and China-based Elastos (ELA) that are unavailable on Binance. But beware. You could be depositing into a black hole.

Is Huobi intentionally placing barriers to prevent you from withdrawing your digital money? Feel free to share your comments below.