Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 191 posts

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

#121

Post by tyingq »

acct1771 wrote: post #100
tyingq wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Public humiliation trumps private escalation. There's really no excuse for a 5 month old customer facing ticket with real notable amounts of money involved. I'd be sorely embarrassed, and it appears they are. At the very least they need a sensible way to separate issues involving real money to be in a different priority bucket with actual escalation.

Just give a shit about all inquiries, or pack it in. My time should now be deprioritized?

Google seems to have been successful at separating which customers get actual support and which don't. I get your viewpoint, but not many tech companies seem to support it.

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

#122

Post by slackoverflower »

yeukhon wrote: post #113
my_usernam3 wrote: post #27

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…

Did you mean it has knocked down your age?

A 6-year old can't buy ETH? Crypto truly is mainstream.

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

#123

Post by rco8786 »

dawhizkid wrote: post #105
WisNorCan wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Social media shaming, unfortunately, seems to be the fast lane to escalated customer support. Good to know for other Coinbase customers.

Social media shaming as a service seems like it could be a big and profitable business to be very honest.

There were a few internal projects/hackweeks at Twitter that were effectively this (of course billed as a way for companies to serve their customer better, not a public shaming device) but none of them ever made it into production.

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

#125

Post by benbreen »

aphextron wrote: post #103
ridgeguy wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take a lawyer with you. Mutter "intentional infliction of emotional distress" and a few other phrases s/he may give you. To me, it sounds like you're treating Coinbase as a friend who's hit a tough patch, rather than as a business. Requiring them to perform as a business does not make you "the crazy guy yelling in a lobby". It makes you a customer.

>Requiring them to perform as a business does not make you "the crazy guy yelling in a lobby". It makes you a customer. Precisely. The inculcation of the former attitude among the masses has been a huge victory for this wave of monopolistic industries. Companies like Google have effectively trained humans to act like software bugs.

Huh, food for thought. I may end up writing a blog post about this whole ordeal, and I think that's an interesting takeaway from it. "Training humans to act like software bugs" in particular is an interesting turn of phrase. Thanks.

Anyway, to be honest -- and this reflects not so much my unfamiliarity with the law but my quasi-familiarity with it, having worked as a legal assistant -- I was actually afraid of bringing lawyers into the mix. At some level, I feared that this newly monopolistic, venture-backed company would be more than willing to see me in court and would somehow manage to win, leaving me with crazy lawyer fees.

It's sad that this was my train of thought, but in retrospect, it's why I took such a weirdly friendly, almost abject tone with them throughout the whole process. I have known and worked for enough lawyers to know that once you open that Pandora's box with a well-funded adversary, things can get unpredictable.

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

#126

Post by dev_throw »

I faced this too, my coins were locked by Coinbase for more than 3 months (due to mismatch in name and my ID) and I could not reach out to anyone in support, although I submitted requests and placed calls. Their ID verification is fubar, I really don't know how it was deployed.

Their phone lines were always busy and the person on the phone was unhelpful and actually gave me false information that my account would be enabled. It took another couple weeks after the call, for it to be enabled. I will not do business with them again, and urge everyone I know to do the same.

When there are threads about finding their HQ in meatspace [https://www.reddit.com/r/CoinBase/comments/7majpn/this_is_co...] to confront them, you know you're dealing with a really shitty business. IIRC their correct address is 13+ Floor, 1 Front St, SF for folks in the Bay Area.

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

#128

Post by tylersmith »

benbreen wrote: post #66

Ok, an update, since I can't edit the original anymore. "Kyle" at Coinbase reached out to me via email: "I’m so sorry for the delay in our response. We were able to clear your account." I can't imagine that it had anything to do with bad publicity from being on the front page of Hacker News... anyway, I'm glad it was finally resolved. Thanks HN.

This is a tale as old as Coinbase. No response until the customer calls them out publicly.

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

#129

Post by jdc0589 »

WisNorCan wrote: post #71
benbreen wrote: post #66

Ok, an update, since I can't edit the original anymore. "Kyle" at Coinbase reached out to me via email: "I’m so sorry for the delay in our response. We were able to clear your account." I can't imagine that it had anything to do with bad publicity from being on the front page of Hacker News... anyway, I'm glad it was finally resolved. Thanks HN.

Social media shaming, unfortunately, seems to be the fast lane to escalated customer support. Good to know for other Coinbase customers.

you don't even have to shame Microsoft Azure. Tweeting @azure is legitimately more useful than a Premier Support agreement.

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

#130

Post by elliottcarlson »

benbreen wrote: post #66

Ok, an update, since I can't edit the original anymore. "Kyle" at Coinbase reached out to me via email: "I’m so sorry for the delay in our response. We were able to clear your account." I can't imagine that it had anything to do with bad publicity from being on the front page of Hacker News... anyway, I'm glad it was finally resolved. Thanks HN.

It took me 7 months to finally get my issue resolved which got me access again to my account. I tried public shaming on HN, Twitter, their support boards etc - and with no luck. I get that they are expanding, and perhaps behind on support requests - but anything hitting more than two months is already embarrassing - what would it take for them to hire appropriately for the level of demand they are getting -- these are obviously not one off cases.
Post reply on HN