Missing Funds from Cold Wallet Deposit

Hey everyone, A friend of mine has been holding some BTC in a cold wallet. He tried to deposit a few tokens to sell them, but after making the deposit, the funds disappeared from his wallet without showing up on the chain. He’s already contacted support with the transaction hash and has been waiting since early January.

Dude, what's with the repeated phrase "on chain"? But seriously, what platform is he trying to deposit to? If it's an exchange, there should be a unique address for that. He could check the address on a blockchain explorer to see if the BTC was sent.

Right, what's the wallet and platform? If the balance got deducted, it seems like the transaction went through but maybe it’s just unconfirmed. Look, there are two scenarios: he might be getting scammed, or he could've sent it to the wrong address, possibly due to malware.

Sorry if my English is off, but he used Bybit. I double-checked, and I can’t find the amount he sent. We made the same deposit before to the same address and it went through in about an hour.

BTC tokens? You mean those pegged versions, not actual Bitcoin? "On chain" isn’t going to help here. If the transaction's recorded, he might have just sent it to the wrong address, maybe because of a copy-paste mistake or some clipboard hijacker.

We made a smaller deposit from the same cold wallet to the same address, and it arrived fine after waiting about 45 minutes. He didn’t mess up the address either; he scanned a QR code. The exchange is saying it was never deposited.

Come on, you still haven’t explained things clearly, man. How did you check the transaction? Did you use a blockchain explorer for the TXID? If it shows confirmed and the address is right, the exchange might be the problem.

I checked the TXID, everything's correct. Same address too, so it has to be the exchange, right? But why would a big name like Bybit do something like that?

It’d help if you shared the Transaction Hash or BTC wallet address where the coins were sent. That way, we can see where the coins ended up and compare it with Bybit's deposit address. I’m skeptical about the deposit address being right.

Did you double-check every character in that address? I’ve seen cases where malware found a look-alike address. Maybe you should verify the exchange address on a different device for safety.

I doubt they would do it intentionally. Bybit is pretty reputable as far as exchanges go. Maybe they're just having some hiccups. Did you show customer support the TXID? That should back you up, what did they say?

Can you check the TXID on an explorer to see if it’s confirmed? Also, what specific BTC token are we talking about? If he sent a BTC token to a BTC address on Bybit, it wouldn't show up because it’s like sending a BRC20 token incorrectly.

Definitely share that TXID if you can. Are you sure it’s BTC and not an ERC20 token? Sending wrapped BTC (WBTC) to an exchange that doesn’t support it could mean losing those funds.

Interesting point there. I haven't heard about Bitrefill before. Are you saying it’s likely safe to conclude it went to the wrong address if it was sent there?

That’s not what I meant. Bitrefill is legit, one of the best platforms I’ve used. If he used Bitrefill or any trustworthy service, my guess is he sent it to the wrong place. If he’s unsure about the service, yeah, he might have been scammed.

Thanks for clarifying! Your explanation helped clear things up. I looked them up and they seem solid.