Most exchangers that take people’s money are not sophisticated. They fail the same small set of checks, and running those checks takes about four minutes.
1. Check the reserve against your trade
A published reserve is the amount of the destination asset the service claims to hold. If it is smaller than what you are about to ask for, the rate is irrelevant — the payout cannot happen, and what follows is either a refund minus fees or a wait of unknown length.
Reserves that are suspiciously round, identical across every direction, or unchanged over days are usually decorative. We compare published reserves against observed payouts, and a mismatch is grounds for delisting.
2. Read the limits before the rate
An attractive rate with a maximum of $300 is a customer-acquisition rate, not a real one. Check that your amount falls inside the stated range, and be particularly careful when it sits just under the maximum — that is where manual review tends to kick in.
3. Test support before you need it
Send a trivial question to whatever support channel is advertised and see how long it takes to get a human answer. A service that takes two days to answer a pre-sales question will not be faster when your transaction is stuck, and that is when it matters.
Support failure is the most common precursor to a service failing outright. It is also the most reliable one: by the time payouts stop, the support channel has usually been quiet for a week.
4. Check the domain, not the design
A polished site means someone bought a template. Registration date is harder to fake. A service claiming five years of operation on a domain registered in March is lying about something, and it is rarely the only thing.
Watch for near-miss domains too. An exchanger you know at example.io
has an impostor at example-io.com, and the impostor’s site is a pixel
copy with a different deposit address.
5. Match the KYC claim against the terms
“No KYC” on the landing page and a compliance section in the terms that reserves the right to request documents at any time are not contradictory — the second is true and the first is marketing. Every exchanger has a compliance system that can escalate.
What matters is whether the service is honest about it. A service that promises unconditional anonymity is either breaking the law where it operates or lying, and neither is a good counterparty. We publish KYC posture as one of four honest states rather than as a yes/no.
6. Read the negative reviews specifically
Positive reviews are cheap to buy. Negative ones are informative in their details: look for whether complaints cluster around one failure mode, whether the service responds, and whether the responses are substantive or boilerplate.
A service with no negative reviews at all after two years of operation has either never had a problem — implausible — or is curating.
7. Send a small test first
For any amount you would mind losing, send a small transaction first and take it all the way to payout. It costs two network fees and it tests everything the other six checks can only infer: that the deposit address works, that the payout actually arrives, and that the quoted rate is the rate you get.
What we do on your behalf
Every service in our directory has been through this. We check reserves against payouts continuously, we measure processing time from completed orders rather than from claims, and we record support failures.
That is diligence, not a guarantee. The seventh check is still yours to make.