Hi,
The tldr for everyone: Entropy.js, you have my deepest sympathy but the "bittrex" address on the Bitshares network is not owned by Bittrex and we unfortunately can't retrieve those funds.
The long version:
It looks like the community (thanks ash!) has deduced what happened with your transfer but I'll pull the details together into a single post.
Steem and Bitshares are separate blockchains and our deposit addresses on each are different. On the Steem blockchain it is "bittrex" and on the Bitshares blockchain, it is "bittrex-deposit". The "bittrex" address on the Bitshares blockchain was registered by some enterprising troll who unfortunately lucks onto deposits like yours. Bitshares is a decentralized blockchain and we can't stop someone from having the "bittrex" account. You can contrast that with twitter where were are able to get accounts shutdown or reclaimed when they attempt to steal our identity.
open.STEEM is an asset on the bitshares network and your transfer went to the hacker. Because that "bittrex" address is owned by someone that isn't us, there is no way for us to get those funds back.
I realize Richie's response was terse but as cryptogee cited and hundreds of others over the last 2.5 years we've been in business could attest, if it's possible for us to reclaim a mistaken deposit, Richie will make the effort to do so despite it being an incredible amount of time and energy.
This is possible only in the case where the address you mistakenly sent to has not been registered by someone else. In those cases we register, claim the funds, and credit your Bittrex account.
I apologize again for the confusion and we certainly could have done more to explain the situation in the support ticket. I'll take it under advisement that we put a warning on the dialog telling users to double check the network they are transferring to. Maybe the team that runs OpenLedger would be willing to block bitshares transfers to the "bittrex" address since it's someone who is obviously scamming.
If you have additional questions or concerns, we are available for chat on our slack (though not always at 1am on a Sunday morning). You can get an invite from http://slack.bittrex.com.
- Bill
HI Bill,
Thanks for your answer on that, that will help a lot of people to understand, I think you should do a post though, I started a #scamalert and I think something like this should be put there.
There are a lot of crypto noobs joining Steem and a lot of people are starting Bittrex accounts, so a warning is really valid. Coming from the non-crypto world, people don't understand exactly how they can get scammed.
Once again, apologies for my noob mistake, I imagine there was lots of face palming going on at the Bittrex offices, when you received my email :-).
CG
i don't think this would be easily possible and also it would be against the idea of OL IMO
We were all new at some point. Richie just did a blog post about how he and I started with bitcoins. I'm guilty of formatting a hard drive with a bitcoin wallet on it that's worth at least $20k now. At the time, the price dropped to ~$12 a bitcoin and I thought bitcoin was a dead fad. :)
https://steemit.com/bittrex/@bittrex-richie/a-little-history-of-bittrex-com-how-it-all-started