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Tell HN: Coinbase is a joke (product and support)

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Tell HN: Coinbase is a joke (product and support)

#1

Post by e40 »

I work with Ukrainians and paying some of them has been a challenge, so we decided to give payment via BTC a try. I got a personal Coinbase account to play around with it, to get more familiar (I had never purchase any crypto until then). Once I got the account and proved to myself that it should work, I started the process to get a business account.

The business account took a long time to get. Probably 2 months. The amount of information they asked for was quite surprising to me. As a founder, I had never given this level of detail to anyone for any purpose. I assumed that it was due to regulations Coinbase were under, but honestly, I do not know. The end goal was important enough that I was willing to go along.

Once I went through the onerous process, I linked our business checking and purchased some BTC and tried to transfer it. I was told there would be a 13 day hold on the funds before they could be transferred to my consultant. I went through support and was told to use a debit card and there would be no hold.

Since I didn't have a debit card, I had to get one. After it came, I tried to add it and I got the error: An error occurred / Business cards are not supported.

That was in mid-December. Here we are in late January and it is still not resolved. Here's a thumbnail of what has happened in between:

- I submitted an email ticket, where they sent me canned responses for the first week or so. They really never seem to understand the issue.

- After a few weeks they finally told me I had a personal account and I couldn't add a business debit card.

- I showed them screengrabs of my account proving that it was a business account.

At this point they ghosted me.

A week ago I tried a chat on the website. I explained everything above and it came down to this:

> A person can only have either a personal or business account, but not both

Let's ignore the fact that they let me open both accounts and never said a word about it. They even let me connect a debit card to my personal account and a checking account to my business account.

Next, they told me if I deleted my personal account I could add the debit card to my business account. I did that. No change.

I started a chat again and after a long time bumped it up a level and said someone would get in touch with me via email.

Yesterday I got an email that my new ticket was closed and asked if my issue was resolved.

At this point, I deleted my personal account and my business account is stuck in "personal" mode and I can't add a debit card, so the hold time means it's useless.

I just want people to know that Coinbase is a complete joke of a company. Don't use them.

Re: Tell HN: Coinbase is a joke (product and support)

#3

Post by therein »

I recommend Kraken, especially for corporate accounts.

They actually have real support that cares. While I was trying to set up my account they kept asking for more and more information into the corporate structure.

I told them "guys, this is just a corporate account, we are going to be trading a limited balance, this is not a market maker, why are you asking us as if we are going to be trading millions monthly".

They actually empathized and proceeded to open the account without ridiculous scrutiny.

Re: Tell HN: Coinbase is a joke (product and support)

#4

Post by madsbuch »

A couple of things:

1. Banks a notoriously bad working with Crypto exchanges. A lot of credit/debit card simply does not work.

2. Prefer DAI/USDT/USDC over BTC. Stable coins appear to be what you actually want in your situation.

3. Run it on polygon or another L2 to get cheaper gas fees.

4. There are several much easier ways to acquire dem – try looking through the options provided by your metamask wallet.

Re: Tell HN: Coinbase is a joke (product and support)

#5

Post by danuker »

Even for personal accounts, KYC regulation implies all personal data go to a handful of centralized exchanges, which incentivizes malicious hackers.

In Romania, I will resort to notaries and LocalBitcoins/classifieds for trading BTC. I would probably get a better deal than the ridiculous exchange spreads (if you include deposit/withdrawal) as well.

Re: Tell HN: Coinbase is a joke (product and support)

#6

Post by polygamous_bat »

I think this level of heavy-handed measures are a result of cases like this [0] where a Sony employee embezzled $150 millions and converted them to BTC using Coinbase. Probably their silly security flags went up thinking you are trying to steal your business's money using BTC?

Edit: people who want to know more about the case, here's a Money Stuff article by Matt Levine [1], jump to "Coinbase compliance". Bunch of related links there as well, like NY Department of Financial Services release [2]. Summary from that:

> In the spring of 2021, an individual purporting to be an employee of a corporation (“Corporation A”) was able to open an account on behalf of Corporation A without authorization from that corporation, and without the appropriate personal identification documentation required by Coinbase policy. As part of a sophisticated fraud, the individual was able to submit an online request form to raise the daily withdrawal limit by 50 times, which was granted despite a total lack of account activity and, therefore, no evidence that the existing thresholds were insufficient for the customer’s activity. Then, on a single day, the employee transferred more than $150 million from Corporation A’s bank account (that the employee had also gained unauthorized access to) into Corporation A’s Coinbase account. The employee then immediately converted the fiat funds into virtual currency, then immediately moved the virtual currency to a wallet off the Coinbase platform. Coinbase did not become aware of this activity until six days later, when Coinbase was contacted by Corporation A’s bank. Coinbase assisted with the investigation of law enforcement, which ultimately led to recovery of the funds.

[0] https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdca/pr/united-states-files-civ...

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-01-05/coinde...

[2] https://www.dfs.ny.gov/reports_and_publications/press_releas...

Re: Tell HN: Coinbase is a joke (product and support)

#10

Post by nailer »

madsbuch wrote: post #4

A couple of things: 1. Banks a notoriously bad working with Crypto exchanges. A lot of credit/debit card simply does not work. 2. Prefer DAI/USDT/USDC over BTC. Stable coins appear to be what you actually want in your situation. 3. Run it on polygon or another L2 to get cheaper gas fees. 4. There are several much easier ways to acquire dem – try looking through the options provided by your metamask wallet.

Re: 2 and 3.

I'd stick to USDC over USDT. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-whuXHSL1Pg&t=194s. USDC still has capitalisation statements. USDT doesn't.

Eth is indeed slow and expensive, but more people (as in: active wallets) use Solana (a fast and cheap layer 1) than the any of the eth layer 2s these days.

Coinbase staff have been caught front running their customers on new tokens listings multiple times now, even after they promised to actively stop it. Whatever's going on in Japan is going on in Japan. Don't trust other people with custody of your funds.

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