Four years on Kraken. Used the same way always: buy, hold, withdraw to my own self-custody wallet (Phantom). Really, peanuts. Same address for 18 months, 11 successful withdrawals since February. On 2 September I sold about $2,000 of BTC for USDC, tried to withdraw to that same address and got cancelled!

Got two emails: my account is restricted as a **scam**-prevention measure, and that specific address is “not supported” going forward. Kraken’s docs say restrictions can trigger on “wallets linked to prohibited or scam-related activity”. Support’s first two agents restated policy. One said “we can assure you that it is no false positive” and wouldn’t say what triggered it.

So I checked the chain. My withdrawal address has been under an address-poisoning campaign for months: scammers send dust from look-alike addresses hoping you’ll copy one by mistake, and push fake transfers from your address to make your history look linked to theirs. On mine, 28 fake token contracts with Unicode characters that render like “USDC”. I never sent anything to a look-alike. This is activity done *to* my address that I can’t refuse, and it seems to be what flagged it.

The third agent, asked narrower questions, confirmed:

It’s two separate restrictions: a 90-day account-level block, plus a permanent block on that address. Day 90 is not a release date. Nothing unlocks automatically. It is “at least 90 days”, if anything. There’s no review form. The review is triggered by attempting a withdrawal to a new address after day 90. The attempt *is* the review.

But the escalation reply says I’ll be “eligible to request an appeal” at day 90. Two different answers to what happens on that day.

Which raises the question: if the day-90 review is a withdrawal attempt, what stops that attempt being read as a fresh flag and restarting the 90 days? One user on r/KrakenSupport reports periods stacking to roughly a year. Kraken’s Reddit account couldn’t confirm.

Has anyone actually reached day 90 and attempted a withdrawal? There are dozens of posts about restrictions starting and almost none about how they end.

I’m not claiming Kraken acted in bad faith. They have compliance obligations, and I’d rather an exchange err toward caution. My complaint is narrower: a system that penalises **you** for what scammers do to your address, with a process opaque enough that you can’t tell if day 90 means anything.

Fun detail: I posted this on r/KrakenSupport as an informational writeup, no account details, per their rules. It was removed, citing an uptick in fraudulent posts. A post about a fraud restriction, taken down for fraud prevention.

If you’ve been through this, how did it end?

TLDR: Scammers poisoned my withdrawal address with transactions that are impossible to decline. Kraken banned all crypto withdrawals for 90 days, no early appeal

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