Exchange froze your deposit "for AML review": what to do
You sent USDT to your exchange account, the transfer arrived, but the balance never showed up. Support says the deposit is "under AML review" and gives neither a reason nor a timeline. This happens on Bybit, Binance, OKX, KuCoin, Bitget and at exchange services. Below is why it happens and what you can do yourself, without middlemen.
Why the exchange is holding the money
An exchange has to check where incoming money comes from. It is not checking you, it is checking the history of the funds: which address sent the transfer and where the money on that address came from. If earlier holders of those USDT include flagged addresses (fraud, a mixer, sanctions, stolen funds), the system sends the deposit to manual review. People often have no idea: they bought USDT from a P2P seller or received a payment from a client, and the risk sat with the sender.
The key point: your own wallet can be clean and the deposit still gets held. That is why your own AML score proves nothing to the exchange on its own.
What to do, step by step
- Do not send more money there and do not open a second account to "get around" the review. It looks like an attempt to avoid it and drags the case out.
- Find the deposit transaction hash. It is in the exchange deposit history and in the wallet you sent from.
- Find out where the sender's money came from. This is exactly what the exchange looks at. Our "Exchange held my deposit" tool takes the hash and shows the sender, its reliability score and the shares of its inflow: sanctions, mixer, flagged addresses, no flags.
- Collect documents on the source of funds: a contract or correspondence with the client, the P2P trade record with the chat and payment confirmation, a statement from the other exchange you withdrew from.
- Write to compliance through the official support ticket. Ask for four things: the current status of the review and the timeline; the list of documents they need; the name of the legal entity holding the funds and your case number; how the funds can be returned to the sender or withdrawn once if the review cannot be completed. The same tool builds a ready letter with a verifiable seal.
- If there is no answer, keep following up in the same ticket and save all correspondence. The exchange's legal entity and country of registration are in its terms of use: that is also where a formal complaint goes if the exchange stays silent.
What we do not promise
An external screening is a second opinion, not a decision. The exchange applies its own policy whatever the external score. If the sender really is high risk, arguing is pointless: it is more honest to ask the exchange to name what exactly raised concern and to document where the money came from. Our letter is built that way.
Watch out: an "AML department" asking for a fee
While people wait, someone writes "from the exchange AML department" or as "unfreezing experts": pay 0.5%, put down a "deposit", send an amount to "verify your wallet". This is a scam. A real exchange compliance team never asks for money to unfreeze funds and never messages you first on a messenger. Talk to the exchange only through a ticket on its official website.