If you receive any restrictions to your account, it’s likely due to a violation of our Terms of Service or due to a compliance or regulatory requirement.
What are the types of restrictions that can be placed on your account?
Restricted, Suspended or Banned - These are restrictions enforced by our platform due to a violation of our Terms of Service.
These restrictions may fall under, but are not limited to the following:
- Any fraudulent activities being done within the marketplace place like posting suspicious offers.
- Any form of manipulation from a user or user’s account (such as inflating feedback scores).
- Using Paxful for activities that are illegal or prohibited by law.
Before your account is closed permanently, you will have an opportunity to withdraw any remaining balance in your account unless otherwise prohibited by an account freeze.
Frozen Accounts for Legal or Compliance Reasons - These restrictions are typically imposed for legal and/or ongoing compliance investigations. Paxful is required by law to comply with these rules in order to operate. This is to ensure that the investigation is performed thoroughly without any intervention from the user should there be any regulated or illicit activities happening from within the accounts. These account restrictions may be joined by a ban or suspension.
Such circumstances might arise from, but are not limited to the following:
- Government, court, or law enforcement orders or directives
- Suspicion of involvement in money laundering or other illegal activities
- Compliance with international financial sanctions and regulations
For your safety and to prevent fraud, we may temporarily freeze your account if we detect any suspicious activity. Once we confirm that your account is secure, we'll promptly lift the restriction.
Here’s a breakdown table to better understand the differences of these restrictions:
Appealing an Account Status Change
There might be instances where there was an oversight during these investigations. As such, users may file for an appeal until a decision has been concluded with their accounts.
How to file an appeal:
Provide brief context with your account details and any critical information that may help out with your case. Please follow our guidelines on how to reach out to our support team.
Once we receive your appeal, we’ll factor in the details you provided and will let you know once our team reaches a conclusion by responding to your ticket.
We’d like to set proper expectations for the following:
In some cases, an applicable law or regulation will prevent us from explaining why we had to close or freeze an account.
If an account is frozen due to a legal or compliance reason, we may not be able to unfreeze the account unless we have received further instructions from the relevant authority.
While we strive to respond to most support queries in 48 hours, in some instances we may take longer to handle an account status appeal due to the unique case-by-case nature of these restrictions.
We also conduct periodic internal reviews of restricted, banned, and frozen accounts, as we acknowledge that situations change and continuous review is essential to ensuring fairness and accuracy. This proactive approach ensures that accounts that no longer pose a risk to the platform or other users can have their restrictions lifted if permitted under the law.