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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?

#181

Post by pwaai »

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 the pattern I'm seeing over at virtually all crypto exchange subreddits. There are so many frantic threads to withdraw money but the ones that make it to top of the list or has significant money involved seems to get solved relatively quicker.

Allegedly now that many banks/credit card companies have cut off crypto exchanges that the only way to cash out is to match your SELL order with somebody buying in....

And now we have this whole USDT fiasco...Tether has actually overtaken the "how to buy bitcoin" google searches...

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=now%207-d&q=bu...

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

#182

Post by lbotos »

rurounijones wrote: post #164
hw wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's disappointing when a company that's as well funded and big as Coinbase leaves customers hanging. I'm a co-founder at a customer conversations management and helpdesk platform - Re:amaze, and we answer _every_ single customer question and conversation on email, social and on our site that come our way. Every single one. Any that we can't answer right away we let them know we're working on it and set a reminder to…

It is wierd that companies are like this. I love everything else about Gitlab yet I am having a less than stellar time with Gitlab support. Is it because for most companies the perception is that if someone needs support they are already more likely to be a bad / lost customer anyway so don't put too much effort into it?

I see Drew from our team already responded but I want to also chime in.

> Is it because for most companies the perception is that if someone needs support they are already more likely to be a bad / lost customer anyway so don't put too much effort into it?

This is definitely not the case. Support is an opportunity to win a customer for life because it's a make or break moment during the customer experience.

At GitLab I realized that we need to build specialized support groups with specific focuses: On-prem and Services.

I'm currently on-boarding a Services Support Manager this week who's focus will be improving the Services support experience. Your comments here echo that it was the right choice to continue investing in our support as it's not where it needs to be.

To loop this back to Coinbase the thing to realize is traditionally companies treat support as a cost of doing business not a revenue generating asset.

In the tech support industry rule of thumb is 18 months until burnout. 18 months until someone leaves your support team on average. I'm sure coinbases turnover is somewhere around that or less with a 5 month backlog.

At GitLab we are trying to buck that industry trend, but we are still in the early stages. Time will tell.

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

#183

Post by thrownaway954 »

asclepi wrote: post #174
thrownaway954 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry you had to go through this. It's pathetic that nowadays the only way to get the attention of a company is to shame them in a public forum. While I'm not a big social media fan myself, I'm glad it's there when we need it to call out people and companies like this. This is the only reason that "Kyle" reached out to you, not because they care about you as a customer. It's a shame really.

Social media has partially democratized access to public shaming, in the US at least, as you no longer need to know someone at a media outlet. But luck remains an important factor. If OP had posted an hour earlier or later, it could have never broken out of 1 or 2 upvotes on HN, and his issue would not have been solved.

I think the fact that (as someone pointed out) Coinbase is a YC had some help as well. No one likes it when the fight starts coming into their own backyeard.

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

#184

Post by aphextron »

fjsolwmv wrote: post #159
simonebrunozzi wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As many will. Which might mean that Robinhood might end up having a worse customer support than Coinbase :(

Why do people keep saying "bad customer support" as a euphemism for wire fraud?

This. If I had "misplaced" someone's money for 5 months I would be in prison.

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

#185

Post by aagha »

There's a lot of people here frustrated with Coinbase and a lot of talk about BBB.

I think if you're going to punch, punch hard: If you're in CA, file a small-claims case. If a Coinbase rep/lawyer fails to show, you're likely to win your case.

Then, contact the SF County Sheriff and have the entrance to their office locked until you receive your money back in full. Details here:

http://www.dca.ca.gov/publications/small_claims/collect.shtm...

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

#186

Post by levifig »

From my personal experience, you have another month to wait… I waited 6 months for a withdrawal to be handled. To be fair, I withdrew to the wrong account number (to Simple, to the old account number with Bancorp), but the bank bounced the transfer and the funds were returned within the week. After that, Coinbase drug their feet for 6 months before I finally got the money right around Christmas time (i.e. I initially withdrew in June).

What bothers me even more than horrible communication is the fact that I converted BTC to USD and withdrew the money because I need the cash at the time (baby + move) and never saw it until much later. Had I kept it BTC–which I would've had I not needed it–that same BTC would've been worth about 8x what I got.

I don't want to scream "foul play" but it REALLY seems that way. There's NO WAY it takes 6 months, including a lot of pointless repeated "Have you checked with your bank? We're so sorry it's taking so long."

So yeah… good luck with Coinbase support. FWIW, Coinbase is the reason I'm done with crypto for good (as currency/investment). It's a minefield of bad actors and greed, incredibly susceptible to foul play and literal criminal activity. I willingly paid more fees with Coinbase because I thought they were a legit business… Nope!

I would normally end this with "…but mileage may vary." Not here. Good luck and godspeed, my friend. o/

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

#187

Post by jyrkesh »

pwaai wrote: post #181
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 the pattern I'm seeing over at virtually all crypto exchange subreddits. There are so many frantic threads to withdraw money but the ones that make it to top of the list or has significant money involved seems to get solved relatively quicker. Allegedly now that many banks/credit card companies have cut off crypto exchanges that the only way to cash out is to match your SELL order with somebody buying in....…

> Allegedly now that many banks/credit card companies have cut off crypto exchanges that the only way to cash out is to match your SELL order with somebody buying in....

I don't know that this is fully accurate. Most exchanges support some amount of self-service withdrawal without KYC verification into private crypto wallets.

Where you do need someone to match your sell order is when you convert back out to fiat currency. But if you're on one of the "trusted" providers here like Coinbase (I recognize the irony of saying this in this thread, but they're still an American company that can't commit blatant fraud a la BitConnect or BitGrail) or Gemini, you should be able to send them cyrptocoins out of your "sketchy" exchange and eventually get fiat.

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

#188

Post by jlardinois »

cryptoz wrote: post #55
PeterisP wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In case it wasn't immediately obvious from my original comment, the issue was that "Cubans" is ambiguous and could be related to commerce that might be covered by sanctions against Cuba.

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

#189

Post by norellana »

I've been waiting 3 months for them to find my $20,000 I wired to Coinbase, Inc in October 27th. During the 1st month I thought it was ok, 2nd month I thought I was crazy but now is unacceptable. It seems that they stole my money.

I'm not crying over some losses, I'm crying over money I wire to buy cryptos but It got lost. Nobody fucking care. They should put their shit together.

I filled a complain with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and Coinbase, Inc replied that "they are working in my case" ... hope it help me. BUT Seriously people, stop working with them, you would say ... its ok for me BUT until is not.

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

#190

Post by quickthrower2 »

thrownaway954 wrote: post #106
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.

Sorry you had to go through this. It's pathetic that nowadays the only way to get the attention of a company is to shame them in a public forum. While I'm not a big social media fan myself, I'm glad it's there when we need it to call out people and companies like this. This is the only reason that "Kyle" reached out to you, not because they care about you as a customer. It's a shame really.

It's a bit like an overloaded dev department. They can't meet their obligations, so which JIRA ticket are you working on? Which customer is 'shouting' the loudest?

Since most HNers will see through the whole - popular HN rant -> resolved and see it a cynical they should perhaps not also solve the issue but make a statement about how they plan to solve other people who have been waiting this long.

Otherwise the message is clear: If you aren't happy, shame us publicly, then you are #1 in the caller queue.

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