One fine morning my phone went into a reboot loop, probably because of out of memory. Tried to adb, but wasn’t working but fastboot seems to be working. Attempted to boot a bootloader with fastboot which failed. I gave up, went to recovery and did factory reset. I was hoping that would be the end of it.

Google started restoring everything. During this time I realised that there are no backups for Authenticator app and I will have to do it manually by resetting it on every site, starting with Google. Google was done and due to laziness, I thought that when the time comes I will add other. So far so good. The phone was set up like it was previously, loaded my favourite themes and fonts and restored WhatsApp from the drive. Done!

Then comes the need to login to ethx.in

“Ethx.in” is a site where we can buy, sell, or transfer ethereum. They launched recently in invite only and as soon as I got the invite I registered and verified KYC and everything was set. Tested their support by sending a few support tickets. Checked sending and withdrawing money to bank. Everything checks out and I started buying and selling ethereum.

Soon realised that I am locked out of the account as I enabled 2-factor authentication and since it was a fresh install of authenticator app, I was not able to get the verification code for login. I was little worried now. They have an “emergency” response team at [email protected] I immediately send a mail to them telling that I am locked out of my account, and I need assistance in unlocking it by disabling 2-factor authentication on my account. I have send a few mails and waited.

After waiting for more than 24 hours and no response for any of the sos mail I was starting to get worried. Then I thought about creating another account and sending a support request from it and I hit another roadblock. Since the site was invite-only I couldn’t register. I remembered someone had shared an invite code in reddit.com. I quickly searched for it and got the invite link and immediately created another account. Once in, I send a support ticket explaining my situation.

After 8 hours in, I received a response stating that I should send a selfie holding my aadhar card to sos email to restore the account. I was sure that I don’t have an aadhar card with me now or when I created the account. So I told them that, and they told me that there is aadhar card shared with them for verification. I was confused as I don’t have an aadhar card with me, then how can I send aadhar card for confirmation. I use to mark the purpose when sharing the photos of identity details for KYC. Next, I told them that they must be having PAN or voter id with markings “for ethx.in verification” or something. Then they insisted that they have aadhar card with that markings.

Then I remembered taking aadhar card from the google drive for the verification and told them that currently I don’t have the card and I will have to go to aadhar processing centre to get a duplicate.

I also asked them whether they can send the money back to the registered bank account of that account until the recovery is completed, which they refused to do so.

After that mail, they have asked for two selfies, one with pan card and another with date and a code written on paper. As I was travelling that time, after 2 hours or so I send those selfies to the sos email and waited. After 7 hours the support team has sent a mail that they have disabled the 2-factor authentication on my account, and I logged in.

Also, i have created a telegram bot to get buy and sell price of there on ethx.in. You can get more info about it on at github