Ask HN: 5 months and counting waiting for Coinbase customer support. Advice?
So Coinbase's disastrous customer service has come up on HN before [1]. But my issue is rather more extreme than a wire transfer that takes a few weeks to go through - I've been waiting for over five months for Coinbase to unlock my account and allow me to access my funds. Since August 20 of 2017 to be exact.
I've never experienced or even heard of such a long wait time for action to be taken on an open customer support ticket and I honestly have no idea how to proceed. Should I start contacting the CFPB or BBB, writing registered letters, etc?
To be clear, I have had contact with various Coinbase customer service reps since August. I also have tried emailing and tweeting at the CEO and Coinbase executives. The refrain is always the same: "We're expanding fast and adding to our customer service team. Your case has been escalated for further review. Please bear with us." I've been patient for months now and am thinking that maybe I'm not following the right strategy - any advice?
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16106793
190 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 238 ms ] threadIf not, perhaps hire a lawyer.
Fair enough. The email simply asked me to prove that I was a US resident by sending in my driver's license and proof of residence (like a utility bill). Which I promptly did. Then nothing.
For the record, I also opened my Bank of America app in Iran and BofA didn't seem to care at all. It's not like I was trying to trade, buy or sell - I literally just opened the app.
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 forgot about it until last summer, when I realized that amount was now worth around $160.
I didn't have access to my college email anymore, so having to provide proof of identity was reasonable; having the entire process take a month wasn't. They also do this particularly insidious thing where if they don't respond to your request for two weeks or so, they automatically close it as unresolved. They do automatically reopen it if you send another email, but that you have to do that in the first place is dumb.
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.).
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.
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.
Also, don't forget that above certain amounts cash between friends also needs to obey a bunch of reporting rules and can not be entirely private. Simply taking a briefcase of cash from your buddy and leaving it at that is illegal.
As the subtitle points out, neither Venmo or the Treasury Department shares the author’s sense of humour.
Minor fucking missing detail...
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 middlemen
That's maybe acceptable if you run a social network, but I fear that Coinbase has taken that lesson to heart and applied it to a business where real money is at stake. I'm increasingly concerned that Coinbase will either get sued or regulated out of business before they can give me my funds back - which at this point should be around 2.5k, so not a fortune, but also not inconsiderable either.
I guess I'll look into a lawyer but it bums me out that it has to come that...
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.
[0] PayPal also seems to freeze (for long periods) and in some cases confiscate customer's funds for no reason. I'm purposely using the word fraud because that's not the reasonable expectation of those originally transmitting or depositing funds with the service.
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 (account verification, transfer delays, lost transactions) that can be easily parsed/routed, and even answered to, programmatically in 80% of cases.
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.
1. Search docs for how to deal with lost 2FA device. Find entry about it.
2. Docs say, "contact support to blah blah blah" with a link to a realtime chat thing for support.
3. Ask question in chat thing.
4. Receive a link to a web page with a description of what to do from the chat bot
5. Follow those instructions, which involve logging in with a different browser (or incognito) and clicking "lost my device".
6. Verify identity, etc. etc. which finally gets the ball rolling on fixing the problem, which takes a couple of days, as I think it actually involves a human at this point, though I never actually talked to one.
It wasn't super painful, but it made me think, "What idiot came up with this? Why would I want to talk to chat bot only to have it take me to the web page that it should have directed me to in the first place when I was looking at the documentation?"
Also, don't underestimate an importance of a ticket update (any update). If you observe a few open cases on Reddit or Twitter, you will see that the worst thing you can do is say nothing - no ETA, not even an acknowledgement... it's the complete silence that makes people freak out and open multiple cases, spam multiple channels, only aggravating the problem.
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.
Shoot me an email and I'll see if we can help.
That message has been pushed all through 2017.
AI is a long way from being at the forefront of customer support. At best AI works well as a complementary tool for customer support agents to help their customers, but not be the customer support agent itself.
What Coinbase needs to do is shore up their support team.
I ended up speaking with one of their board members.
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.
My time should now be deprioritized?
Also you can transfer your balance to GDAX for free (it's part of Coinbase and trade there with lower fees)
https://www.bitsonline.com/square-expands-bitcoin-pic-guide/
I have tried to be as polite and understanding as possible and not get mad throughout this whole process - even when the customer service rep I waited two hours to talk to told me that the mere act of replying to an open ticket causes a new ticket to be created, and then demotes the old ticket to the bottom of the priority list! (That was absolutely Kafkaesque).
But honestly, I have been so disappointed by the utter lack of concern or sympathy among Coinbase's employees. I can follow them on Twitter and watch them gloating about the enormous profits they and their company are making. Meanwhile hundreds, probably even thousands of people are waiting for weeks and months for basic help. It has been a source of significant anxiety and stress for me to be honest.
Then again, if another month goes by with no action, I really might end up being the guy marching around with a sign in lobby, who knows...
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.
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.
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.
You can also try Kraken (they just upgraded but had a lot of site reliability issues before) or Robinhood once it launches next month.
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!
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.
I do hope that someone who works for Coinbase sees this, and I'll be sure to update when/if they resolve it. I don't think that this company is a new Mt. Gox run by scammers like some people on r/coinbase seem to, but I am kind of shocked that I have spent ~6 hours on their customer service line, sent ~10 emails and tweets, and ~10 messages on their online help desk (and now this thread) and I still am just sitting here with an "escalated case" from last year with no updates.
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.
The BBB is not part of the "authorities":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Business_Bureau#Critici...
http://money.cnn.com/2015/09/30/news/better-business-bureau-...
http://business.time.com/2013/03/19/why-the-better-business-...
https://www.ncconsumer.org/news-articles-eg/the-better-busin...
This is a very, very successful model, as demonstrated by many of the biggest companies around.
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...
Still trying to figure out if its an OCR process, or some human did it. Thought for a while I might have an enemy working there ;)
And its really rather hilarious. All of this ID verification stuff is needed for DHS regulations to prevent money laundering and terrorism.
https://medium.com/@mseiler1/coinbase-support-is-non-existen...
Sure, that'll happen. Coinbase just sends out a quarterly tweet that "hey, we're ramping up support!" and calls it good.
I'd say hang in there. With the recent bubble their statement make sense, so try to be patient.
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.
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.
Eventually someone suggested to write an angry tweet about them... it seemed stupid but I was out of ideas. I did it and they immediately reached out and paid for it in full. I often wonder how many people never think to complain in public and get screwed.
More and more it’s the only lane.
> Good to know for other Coinbase customers.
Public shaming on a tech forum or social media should never be a viable channel for consumer support. It’s a symptom of the breakdown of all other channels.
I’ve done this a handful of times when I’ve gotten the runaround after being polite and following the rules.
But damn, one would think that there's a ticket-age view somewhere in the triage process. I wonder whether five months isn't that unusual.
Its sooner or later posts like OP will be instantaneously deleted not to create too much shaming.
(also, consider that I would happily write several comments like yours... If only they were useful in any form).
It has everything to do with this. Glad your issue was resolved, cos I was going to suggest you post on r/cryptocurrency and r/coinbase on etc reddit.com
That's the place to post your issues on. All the major exchanges like Kraken, Bitstamp, GDAX (Coinbase) magically respond and sort the issue out once the post hits the main page.
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.
The vast majority of companies are run reasonably well. Coinbase is an outlier, a total shitshow.
They’re going to get destroyed by Robinhood and similar because they’re a terrible company that was printing money despite themselves, so there was nothing forcing them to admit how utterly terrible they are.
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.
Just plain inexcusable that it takes one HN article to get things resolved.
BTW, you're not the only one with these issues. There are a number of complaints from people in the same boat as you on Reddit as well
I sometimes stick up for giant tech companies when people I know (usually academics) talk about how they're inhumane or evil. I tend to think that people on the whole mean well, and that, since these companies are, after all, composed of people who generally mean well, we should give them the benefit of the doubt. The principle of charity and all that.
But Coinbase really does seem to be the rotten apple in the barrel. They are hands down the most inhumane company I've ever interacted with. I came away from this whole thing feeling scared about a future in which this type of behavior by corporations is the norm - I keep thinking about Snowcrash or that scene in Elysium where Matt Damon is getting shocked by the police robot!
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?
We absolutely want to help every customer have a good experience. When we fail at that we want to do everything possible to turn it around. I look forward to helping you.
> 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.
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...
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.
If then nobody does anything, the entire department is notified. That never had to happen.
Not sure how they operate with horrid support.