You initiated a transaction, sent, say, ETH to our wallet and suddenly found out your money was sent to an ETC wallet. This is an unfortunate but still frequent experience that anyone may encounter by accident. In this tip, we want to give you profound insights of such issues that will help you learn about measures you can take to get them resolved.

There are two issues related:

  • You’ve sent money to a wrong wallet that belongs to you

  • You’ve sent money to a wrong wallet that belongs to Changelly


Wallet belongs to you

When initiating a transaction, you should enter your destination wallet address. If it is incorrect or doesn’t correspond to the coin you are buying, you will see the message below and won’t be able to proceed to the next step.

Unfortunately, some altcoins have the same address structures which make impossible to check whether your wallet address is appropriate. That’s why you can accidentally send BCH to a BTC wallet or ETC to an ETH wallet and vice versa.


Retrieving your funds

If your transaction is finished already, and your coins are in a wrong wallet now, you may try to retrieve them. To do that, you should have your private keys on hand that give you full control over your funds. Just import your private keys to the wallet the coins have been sent to so that you will get access to them. Simply put, it’s like if you unlock the door to enter the house. This option, however, is available only in case you own the private keys of your wallet. If the keys are under control of the wallet service you use, you should contact them and kindly ask to recover your coins.


Wallet belongs to Changelly

We’re doing the same thing when getting your ABC to our non-ABC wallet. It goes without saying that your transaction cannot be processed automatically, in this case. To finish it, we should retrieve the amount first. Depending on our workload, the process may take up to 21 working days. The good news is that you’ll receive your coins, eventually.


SegWit wallets

Unfortunately, not all the cases above have a positive outcome. Although sending BCH to a regular Changelly’s BTC wallet is not fatal, things get more complicated if your funds are sent to a SegWit BTC address. If you’ve sent altcoins to Changelly’s BTC wallet starting with “3” or “M”, we are unlikely to retrieve them.


And here is why

The Bitcoin Cash chain is incompatible with the SegWit chain of Bitcoin. BCH utilizes P2SH addresses, whereas SegWit addresses comprise the P2SH-P2WPKH structure. Officially, there is no way to withdraw BCH from SegWit wallet addresses. All unofficial methods posed as a solution for this case are quite risky and require involving third parties.


Blockchain incompatibility

As was mentioned above, not every case is in our power to be solved. Due to inattentiveness, your funds could be sent to the totally different currency thro the ticker similarity. Even one letter could play a crucial role in the destination of transferring in such cases as Doge and Dgb, NEO and NOAH, ZEC and ZEN etc. These and many other currencies can't be retrieved due to the blockchain incompatibility. Please be very attentive and check all the transaction details beforehand.


For this reason, we insist on thorough checking the address you are about to send your money to.


I sent my money to an unknown wallet

If you fall prey for phishing activities, input an unknown wallet address by accident or provide an incorrect destination tag, you can send your money to an unknown wallet. Unluckily, this is the case we cannot handle, as it is physically impossible. If you suspect that your money has been sent to an unknown wallet, please report us at support@changelly.com, so we can investigate the issue and provide you with guidelines.