Hi, @mannacurrency "One of the moves we made is we took $500 and purchased Steem on the open market..."
if you did not solve your issue yet,
I just wanted to let you know, that it is much easier to use Litecoin, ETH, or BTC to buy Steem/SBD/SP using @BlockTrades to make the transfer. trying to send steem in from the outside open market is a nightmare for some reason, as you have encountered.
you can trade your Steem for one of the coins mentioned above in the market you have your Steem in, and then with LTC or BTC, etc... go to Blocktrades, and in a matter of minutes the transfer will be complete.
I hope this helps.
Thank you for the suggestion.
One of our members had an account so he said he would do it for us.
We learned a lesson there.