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Ask HN: 5 months and counting waiting for Coinbase customer support. Advice?

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Re: Ask HN: 5 months and counting waiting for Coinbase customer support. Advice?

#21

Post by DoofusOfDeath »

hellcow wrote: post #13
mv4 wrote: post #6

It's been over a month for me. My case hasn't been touched, except for one automated "read the FAQ" update. Lost my ETH transaction. Thousands are having the same issue (lack of support), based on Twitter alone. Tweeting at the CEO is useless, unless you're someone famous. The really sad part - with the amount of money they are making ($1B/yr), they should be able to handle support. It's only several categories (acco…

I actually founded a company that does ML-based customer service alongside humans. https://www.abotlabs.com If anybody at Coinbase wants to reach out, I can probably automate 20-50% of your queries with integrations into your backend systems. Email is in my profile.

> I actually do ML-based customer service.

An alternative business model: An ML-based recommender for Coinbase's customers for how best to obtain satisfaction.

The revenue model would be a little harder to design, but you might help more deserving people.

Re: Ask HN: 5 months and counting waiting for Coinbase customer support. Advice?

#22

Post by colinbartlett »

cryptoz wrote: post #20
jlardinois wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a similar issue with Venmo—a friend tried to pay me back for a Cuban sandwich, and the transaction was held up because he just wrote "Cubans" as the description. Only in Venmo's case, the issue was resolved mere hours after he sent an email explaining the situation. I opened a Coinbase account back in college ~6 years ago when they were giving $10 in Bitcoin to anyone who signed up with a .edu email address. I…

Woah. Venmo parses and makes decisions on the description field before performing the transaction? That's wild. I would have thought that to just be a convenience field for the customers. So Venmo decides what you can spend money on and what you can't? Yikes, I'm happy to not use it regularly.

Which is crazy because I've only used it once or twice but each time I've noticed many people use tongue in cheek descriptions like "for drugs" or "strippers" when they are just splitting a bar tab.

Re: Ask HN: 5 months and counting waiting for Coinbase customer support. Advice?

#23

Post by IronKettle »

cryptoz wrote: post #20
jlardinois wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a similar issue with Venmo—a friend tried to pay me back for a Cuban sandwich, and the transaction was held up because he just wrote "Cubans" as the description. Only in Venmo's case, the issue was resolved mere hours after he sent an email explaining the situation. I opened a Coinbase account back in college ~6 years ago when they were giving $10 in Bitcoin to anyone who signed up with a .edu email address. I…

Woah. Venmo parses and makes decisions on the description field before performing the transaction? That's wild. I would have thought that to just be a convenience field for the customers. So Venmo decides what you can spend money on and what you can't? Yikes, I'm happy to not use it regularly.

More than likely (in fact I would put it at like, 99% chance):

It's an OFAC thing. If they allow money transactions from Cuban nationals they run the risk of pissing off the Treasury dept.

Many companies do it in a very ham-fisted way (flag anything with "Cuba" in the title, etc.).

Re: Ask HN: 5 months and counting waiting for Coinbase customer support. Advice?

#26

Post by mrgordon »

faitswulff wrote: post #25

Damn, I just opened a coinbase account, thinking they were the only reputable exchange around. Luckily I don't have that much invested. Does anyone have suggestions for competitors?

It works fine 99.9% of the time. I know many people who have used Coinbase / GDAX for years without any issues.

You can also try Kraken (they just upgraded but had a lot of site reliability issues before) or Robinhood once it launches next month.

Re: Ask HN: 5 months and counting waiting for Coinbase customer support. Advice?

#27

Post by my_usernam3 »

Oh hey me too!

First I bought a bunch of ETH. It went up and I went to sell them in November. Coinbase wanted Identity verification. No problem, filled out the form. Forgot a required field during the process and when it refreshed, it knocked my birthday up 10 years! Now they think I'm 16.

On the other hand, it might be a feature because of how much ETH has gone up while my (apparently teenage) self can't do anything about it!

Re: Ask HN: 5 months and counting waiting for Coinbase customer support. Advice?

#28

Post by dna_polymerase »

At one point in the next few hours coinbase employees will enter this discussion. They will probably elevate your issue and make sure you are responded to within hours.

This is of course just a measure they take to keep the crowd silent. And it will not help other people with the same/other problems.

Please report them to BBB and other authorities within your reach. Companies should receive no love for this kind of behaviour.

If you can't scale your customer service with demand stop the signups, like binance did. Coinbase seems to be constantly unable to satisfy spikes in demand, such a company should not be trusted with money.

Re: Ask HN: 5 months and counting waiting for Coinbase customer support. Advice?

#29

Post by subcosmos »

Boy you'll find my story hilarious...

I uploaded a photo of my driver's license for identity verification, and they either use humans or ML to read my name. Suffice it to say, they got the wrong name on my account and I've been unable to change it for months!

Check out this email I got from them! https://steemit.com/coinbase/@subcosmos/coinbase-incorrectly...

Re: Ask HN: 5 months and counting waiting for Coinbase customer support. Advice?

#30

Post by baddox »

mankash666 wrote: post #3

They seem like a chronic bad actor. I believe small claims court, BBB, CFPB are all valid recourses. Better still - if you can make this a class action by eliciting similar victims to come forward, you may actually get them to change their ways. Right now it seems like they can simply fuck with you without consequence. And then there's the irony of coinbase being a middlemen in a market that aimed to remove the middl…

Huh, how are they a middleman? You mean between individuals trading (GDAX) or between cryptocurrency and fiat currency (the main Coinbase.com product)? Neither of those services are what I would call a “middleman,” and neither of them are “supposed” to not exist in the cryptocurrency market (with the exception of some proposals to create fully decentralized exchanges).
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