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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?

#51

Post by jjeaff »

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.

That's why for every single transaction that I do on venmo, I put "payment" as the descriptor.

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

#52

Post by user5994461 »

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…

>>> 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.

That's what exchanges do, screw their customers.

In fact, the biggest issue is the owner running away with the money, that's why exchanges are regulated.

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

#53

Post by PeterisP »

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.

Every payment service provider is required to filter transactions if they offer payment services to consumers. (Part of AML, anti-money-laundering legislation) In essence, there's a set of things that money can't be spent on, and it's their responsibility to take measures ensuring that their customers don't spend (in significant amounts) money on that, and show that these measures are reasonably effective (i.e. that they're not just for show - if they assist their customers to circumvent their filters, that's a crime) or not offer payment services at all. For some of the wider restrictions (e.g. payments to cuban nationals) it may result in quite wide-catching automatic filters; and it's the choice of the company whether just to block the payment or spend time and $ to have a human look at the payment and make a decision on whether you can spend money on that or not.

If you want to use services that ignore what you can spend money on and what you can't, you literally have to use illegal services - no legitimate company in the western world is allowed to offer that.

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

#54

Post by sitepodmatt »

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…

Bot support sucks. Revolut is a case study in this #fail. Make things clear and idiot proof is a better path to avoiding time answering simple questions. I missed the days of some human on the end of a mechanical turk task copy and pasting some loosely related canned answer when with dealing with bots.

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

#55

Post by cryptoz »

PeterisP wrote: post #53
cryptoz wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Every payment service provider is required to filter transactions if they offer payment services to consumers. (Part of AML, anti-money-laundering legislation) In essence, there's a set of things that money can't be spent on, and it's their responsibility to take measures ensuring that their customers don't spend (in significant amounts) money on that, and show that these measures are reasonably effective (i.e. that…

> If you want to use services that ignore what you can spend money on and what you can't, you literally have to use illegal services

Cash between friends is not illegal. Venmo, for lots of people including me, just replaces cash for paying your friends back. That's even their #1 example they have on their website for why you might use Venmo.

There is no agency or anyone in charge of asking what I'm spending the money on when I give my friend a $5 for lunch. If Venmo wants to replace that experience, they can't refuse the payment because they think I'm suspicious and expect to keep my business.

I understand the pressure they are under as a payment processor. But the alternative to Venmo to keep payment privacy intact is not illegal, it's just plain old cash.

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

#56

Post by FireBeyond »

aurelius12 wrote: post #50
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…

They're in the process of ramping up pretty seriously I think. http://fortune.com/2018/01/22/coinbase-tina-bhatnager-twitte...

Hah. They've been "ramping up" for over a year now.

That message has been pushed all through 2017.

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

#57

Post by FireBeyond »

snissn wrote: post #38

Coinbase really needs to suspend their new account creation. AFAIK almost all of the other "reputable" exchanges have gone through periods of not allowing new users so that their support network can catch up. https://medium.com/@mseiler1/coinbase-support-is-non-existen...

What, and turn down the money faucet?

Sure, that'll happen. Coinbase just sends out a quarterly tweet that "hey, we're ramping up support!" and calls it good.

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

#59

Post by xkcd-sucks »

benbreen wrote: post #33
dna_polymerase wrote: post #28

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 b…

I just filed a complaint with the CFPB on the recommendation of another HN user below; it was super easy and I now realize I should have done so much earlier. I honestly just kept expecting this would be resolved, and was trying my best to be patient and not complain. In retrospect, bad strategy! I should have complained a lot more publicly, earlier. I do hope that someone who works for Coinbase sees this, and I'll b…

>I don't think that this company is a new Mt. Gox run by scammers like some people on r/coinbase seem t

That's even worse-- If it's malice the people in charge can plausibly decide to make it better; if it's incompetence they may not be able to make it better at all.

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

#60

Post by sushid »

I've mentioned this in other threads but I had a very significant holding in ETH (more than enough to buy a car) stuck in limbo for about a week until I emailed them every day about it.

I would say call and be on hold for about a hour (no joke, it was around 70 minutes when I called about a month ago) and talk to them to escalate your case to priority 1. It'll then be resolved in about two weeks.

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