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I wanted to check out the whole Narrative economy thing, and get involved. I've mentioned this before but I really liked the idea of Narrative before it went, ah, terribly.
On the Narrative network, you can purchase a Niche. A Niche is like a subject... so imagine you made some Steem every time someone tagged #cryptocurrency or #fitness. Obviously all the actual useful Niches were snapped up by the Development team before anyone had a lookin, but I was still excited about Niches like #pixelart and #ninjawarrior.
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To purchase a Niche, you have to buy them in NRVE tokens. NRVE tokens are only available on a 2 exchanges, so to facilitate this transaction, I sent some Ethereum from Coinbase (I know, I know) to LaToken and purchase some NRVE tokens. Paying by Paypal was an option, but I was happy to do the work to avoid the 15% charge.
Setting up a Neon wallet was super painless. I've had a number of wallets already, and I quite like the Neon one. Sending NRVE tokens from LaToken was easy... and took somewhere from 5 to 20 minutes to appear in my Neon wallet.
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So pretty!
Sending crypto is so much quicker than dealing with banks, but I still get nervous about it, so I usually send a test amount first. So I send a small amount of NRVE, it appeared, then I sent about 6K NRVE tokens, totally appeared, then I sent 17K NRVE tokens.
That last step, where I should have been the most cautious was actually where I was the most boneheaded. Instead of opening up my NEON wallet again, I went to my previous transaction in LaToken and grabbed the address from there, and copied and pasted that into my last transaction.
The problem was... I grabbed the sent from address, not the sent to.
Usually this isn't a problem... in a wallet, the Send From address is your address, so it fails when you try to send to yourself... in the LaToken exchange, you're not sending it from yourself... LaToken sends it on your behalf.
What does this mean?
This means I sent 17K of NRVE tokens to LaToken instead of to myself. Bonehead!
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Okay, no sweat.. I'm sure I'm not the stupidest person to ever use their system... I created a support ticket and used their expert chat.
LaToken's Support Chat is pretty great. There is always someone there, they're polite and they type out proper, readable sentences.
The only problem is.... they can't do much.
In my situation, all they can do is tell me that the tech team and that I should wait a day or two.
Just another day...
I logged this ticket on the 30th of January 2019.
Yeah, that's right... 3 months ago.
I'm not super technical, but I imagine all they need to do is take the transaction details I gave them... check that it wasn't linked to anything... and then either forward the payment onto the address I gave them, or refund the transaction. I imagine this would take anywhere from 5 to 30 minutes.
3 months!
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I've sent e-mails, I log into the Customer Support Chat every couple of days... I've been told they need to set up a new node to fix my problem, I've been told that the CTO has to authorize the transaction. I've been told at least 30 separate times it should be solved in the next day or two. The 'Tech Team' are completely uncontactable, nor have I ever received an e-mail from them asking for further information.
There's no way for me to escalate, there's no governing body or anyone to oversee quality.
They don't really have a social media presence... all I could really find was a review site called Trust Pilot.
The reviews on Trust Pilot are an absolute mess.
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You either get very angry, very long and detailed 1 star reviews or very short 5 star reviews from Russia. I've highlighted to TrustPilot that a lot of the reviews seem fake, but they don't truly care... they just want the user activity. Latoken is very good at responding publicly to the people unhappy with their service... but they don't respond any further than just asking for more details... You used to be able to see the country that the reviewer was from... all of LaToken's good reviews were from Russia, the bad ones, from anywhere else... but, ah, this functionality has been taken away, further validating TrustPilot's uselessness.
So... I'm trapped.
LaToken is under no obligation to fix my issue and there's nothing I can do to convince them otherwise.
NRVE tokens aren't available on many exchanges but I would offer you this advice:
Don't be a bonehead.
If you can't not be a bonehead, don't use LaToken.