LocalCoinSwap.com Review

Our Review of the peer2peer bitcoing trading website LocalCoinSwap.com

With LocalBitcoins restricting services and abandoning their core clients everyone is searching for alternatives. One website trying to position themselves as a LocalBitcoin alternative is the P2P crypto website LocalCoinswap.com.

Localcoinswap is a relatively new website. Based in Hong Kong they are run by CTO Nathan Worsley and COO Daniel Worsley. The company claims to have been in business since 2015 but according to the Internet Archive they went through almost a year of crowdfunding “presale” before launching sometime in late 2019.

When we signed up for LCS we were impressed how quick and simple it was. There was no requirements for photo identification or other hassles that often slow down the registration process. This does allow a great many scammers (as we will get to) but it also appeals to the many people that value privacy and anonomity.

At the time of this review they currently support the trading of 24 cryptocurrencies. They are the only P2P website we know of that allows people to trade Bitcoin BTC, Ethereum ETH, Monero XMR, Litecoin LTC, Dash, and Ripple XRP. The other 19 coins really aren’t coins most people trade or use and the ads for those were limited or non-existent.

The payment options are equally as impressive. Everything from online to local cash trades available. While the number of ads available are small, it reminded us of the beginning of LBC. Lots of options and a growing community.

We places a few ads and waited. We quickly had our first trade. The interface is not very intuitive but we were able to figure it out and the trade went smoothly.

The second person we attempted to trade with was a scammer. He lied about putting the bitcoin into escrow and then tried rushing us to pay. The trade was not funded but we could not cancel. We clicked the dispute button and nothing happened. No report sent, no page reload, it simply didn’t work. We tried it on an android phone and a Windows laptop, in both the dispute button didn’t work.

We wrote support asking them to cancel the trade and to ban the scammer. 3 days later they responded telling us there was a bug and we should try again instead of doing as we requested. The dispute button still didn’t work so we had to write support again.

In another trade we accidentaly hit the dispute button trying to upload an image as proof of payment. This time the dispute button did work and locked the trade. The release button for the seller then disappeared which is an issue. Often trades will be disputed and this causes the other party to remember to complete the trade and release the escrow. This time support responded in about 18 hours and released the trade.

After the dispute button did work for the 3rd trade we tried it for the 2nd trade and it still did not work. At the time of this writing the trade has still not been canceled and the scammer is still on the website.

Our guess is disputes do not work when escrow is not enabled because. This is a big problem as people need the ability to cancel a trade before escrow is funded.

There is also no way to flag/report someone from their profile. Not being able to quickly report a scammer is a major issue.

Rating: 3 of 6 confirmations

Overall we like LocalCoinSwap. It has a long way to go but we think it has promise. LCS really needs to step up their support and clean up their user interface. Also some sort of associated forum would be greatly helpful for many users and foster a sense of community

Our alternative suggestion is to find a reputable trader online. Many traders offer options that they may not advertise on a website. You can use a better escrow service like Bitrated for the trade itself.

Pros

• Website is easy to sign up and use
• Allows anonymity
• Offers multiple payment methods
• The best selection of cryptocurrencies

Cons

• User interface is not very user friendly
• Website is new with a lot of bugs
• Customer support times are long and support is not good about resolving issues
• Extremely limited way to report scams and bad traders which is a large security and trust issue