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On Twitter, an outcry is brewing against the storage fee: a fee charged by Wirex that many users are probably just now noticing.
In fact, reading the general terms of service of Wirex, this fee is well specified and has been in force since at least July 15th, 2020.
The fee in question is precisely a charge that is applied to maintain storage for users, especially inactive users. This fee varies up to 0.003 BTC per day if the account remains inactive for 18 months.
Considering that Bitcoin is currently worth about $56,000, 0.003 BTC equals about $169. Multiplied by 30, that’s $5,070 a month. That’s a lot of money.
What is the storage fee on Wirex
The storage fee is a fee that applies to “dormant” accounts, i.e. accounts that have been inactive for a long time. There are two different levels of application. For users inactive for 9 and up to 18 months, the storage fee on fiat accounts is $5, or £5, or €5 per month. While for cryptocurrency balances, a fee of 0.20% of the balance, of at least £5 per month, applies.
For accounts that have instead been inactive for more than 18 months, a fee of $5, or £5, or €5 per month applies but for cryptocurrency balances, a fee of 0.003 BTC per day is also applied.
In addition, Wirex specifies, the balance can also be used for their liquidity pools, but without affecting the user’s balance.
The solution to all this:
“Just transact with us to make your account active again”.
Basically, this fee should encourage Wirex users to constantly use their accounts. The alternative is to empty the account, since the storage fee only applies to those with deposited funds.
Unfortunately, many users were evidently unaware of this mechanism and have had large amounts of funds deducted, despite the fact that Wirex writes in its terms of service that users are notified at least 30 days before a withdrawal is made via email. For this reason, the platform recommends making even a single transaction, whether deposit, withdrawal, exchange or transfer, to make the account active again and avoid the storage fee being applied.
But many have expressed their anger on Twitter, even talking about fraud, exit scam and the like.
Omg!! £4,500 a month storage fee to hodl coins on @wirexapp – this needs to STOP – people can’t transact when the world is shut down!! 😡😡😡😡😡😡#WirexScam https://t.co/GzkRnC8ZM9
— Booboo 🙅♀️ (@XRPBooboo) March 14, 2021
Unfortunately though, the procedure was made clear, so this is not a scam, but a (questionable) fee that was foreseen in the rules of use, which any user explicitly accepts when opening an account.
It is always a good idea to withdraw the funds when choosing to stop using a platform and to deposit them in a proprietary wallet that is not linked to exchanges or other centralized platforms.