Technically, this post is a bit different from the others in the same section. It's not that I had some issues with customer service or tech support from Binance. In fact, on the screenshot below, you will be able to see that it was fine. But... The whole conversation made me think, that I may need to find another platform.
You can read the whole conversation on the screenshots, but here's the gist. As usual for me I went to my dashboard there to see the status. I was logged out, so I used my passkey to login, and was met with a message, that said that my account was suspended because of connection from restricted country. I do use Proton VPN, keep it enabled most of the time, but I use Finnish servers there. I checked it - correct country. Checked extension in browser - not enabled. Just as expected.
This was clearly a mistake, and that can happen, when IP get linked to wrong country. From what I understand that's pretty rare these days, but not impossible. I wrote to support, and their bot claimed that I connected from US. Which was not the case. A human confirmed that. And that would be it: just wait 12 hours and login again. But there was a claim, that VPN are prohibited by terms of use. That's reasonable, I guess, but...
VPN is not prohibited at the time of writing. Anonymizing proxy is, but VPN is neither anonymizing, nor a proxy, it's a completely separate thing. Humans in the conversation were claiming, that it is implied by "anonymizing proxy" or rather by Binance definition of the term, which is not present in the terms of use. In the end I was sent to a feedback form.
There is a valid reason for them to... Maybe not prohibit VPNs, but restrict them, at least. It was mentioned in the chat: Binance needs to comply with legislations in various regions, and VPN can allow to circumvent those, which can make the platform liable if they allow a transaction when they know that user is accessing over VPN and doing something they should not. But:
- Who cares if I use VPN while connecting from VPN servers from the same country, which is set as the country in my profile? That should not matter, since I authenticate on the platform either way.
- It's not prohibited by the terms of use, and saying that "it is implied" is just... Wrong.
Yeah, laws and rules have "interpretation process", but it's done using respective definitions. If they are not provided in the respective document, you use common definitions, and tech people will tell you that proxy is not the same as VPN, although they can function in a similar manner. Let alone they are unlikely to cause Binance Internet providers to stop providing.
I know, maybe I am being too pedantic here, and, again, prohibition of VPN on such platform does make sense to me to some extent... Although.... Maybe not, after all. You do need to provide you identity there, and share documents proving your residency in respective country... IP does not even matter here. Or was I the only one, that was requested such verification? Prohibiting proxies still make sense here, because they are a potential security risk.
Either way, my point is, that if you are using VPN and Binance, you should be aware of this limitation, and of the way they are interpreting their own rules. Because of the latter, I would probably recommend against using it, but on the other hand, I am not aware of that many trusted alternatives.
