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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 abl

• artursapek 9y ago
  Sad how that's what it takes. I had a similar experience getting Aetna to pay for my wife's home birth... they gave a gap exception and promised to pay for it months in advance. Afterwards, when I actually tried getting them to, they ignored me for weeks and stonewalled me on the phone. 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.
• WisNorCan 9y ago
  Social media shaming, unfortunately, seems to be the fast lane to escalated customer support. Good to know for other Coinbase customers.
  • koolba 9y ago
    > Social media shaming, unfortunately, seems to be the fast lane to escalated customer support. 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.
  • dawhizkid 9y ago
    Social media shaming as a service seems like it could be a big and profitable business to be very honest.
    • fnordfnordfnord 9y ago
      Pitch that at YC this Summer!
    • rco8786 9y ago
      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.
    • zitterbewegung 9y ago
      Twitter and HN already serve this purpose. I have used both to do the same exact thing as the author has done here. I actually think that it is part of HN's purpose.
      • dawhizkid 9y ago
        HN is not the masses. The whole point is there's potential to scale the very sort of company shaming that works really well for a niche group of tech workers on HN to everyone.
  • jdc0589 9y ago
    you don't even have to shame Microsoft Azure. Tweeting @azure is legitimately more useful than a Premier Support agreement.
  • badtuple 9y ago
    I support it in this extreme case. But as someone who does tons of all-hands support at companies with _really_ good support, please start with normal channels. Starting out publicly paints you as really aggressive and hard to work with. To diagnose anything complex, and for your own privacy, you'll need to move to email anyway. You'll get good support either way because we're professionals, but there's no need to start any interaction with a middle finger.
  • paulcole 9y ago
    The best way to do it is to come across as totally unhinged. They know you can’t be reasoned with or ignored so they actually have to solve your problem. I’ve done this a handful of times when I’ve gotten the runaround after being polite and following the rules.
• mirimir 9y ago
  Wow. After five months of brush-off, two hours on HN resolved the issue. That's insane. I guess that Coinbase folk must read HN.
  • TAForObvReasons 9y ago
    Coinbase is a YC company and HN is a YC site, so it really isn't surprising.
    • mirimir 9y ago
      Ah, makes sense. 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.
      • joering2 9y ago
        Yepp. The troubling time is ahead of us, as many times I already see moderators are deleting very interesting technology-related articles and news and most of the time, God only knows why. Its sooner or later posts like OP will be instantaneously deleted not to create too much shaming.
      • robryan 9y ago
        I suspect their metric is probably time taken to answer, so coming back to someone with a non answer that deals with them for another few days probably makes the metric look okay.
    • mehrdadn 9y ago
      YC funding should really come with strings attached, like getting back to tickets in less than 5 months...
  • rublev 9y ago
    Coinbase is complete scum, not surprising.
    • 9y ago
• justboxing 9y ago
  > I can't imagine that it had anything to do with bad publicity from being on the front page of Hacker News 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.
  • aroman 9y ago
    I think you missed the sarcasm :)
• GoRudy 9y ago
  After waiting to hear Coinbase since May / June and missing the Ethereum run up 4x i'll just go to Robinhood now.
  • simonebrunozzi 9y ago
    As many will. Which might mean that Robinhood might end up having a worse customer support than Coinbase :(
    • fjsolwmv 9y ago
      Why do people keep saying "bad customer support" as a euphemism for wire fraud?
      • aphextron 9y ago
        This. If I had "misplaced" someone's money for 5 months I would be in prison.
• thrownaway954 9y ago
  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.
  • morogop 9y ago
    It’s unfair to say that this is the only way to get a conpany’s attention. 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.
  • eksemplar 9y ago
    I think they may have lost that battle too. I mean, I’ve read a story like this every week since December on various Cryptocurrency subreddits. Maybe it’s just me, but I know I won’t be using Coinbase ever again, and with Robin Hood going into crypto, the criminal behavior at Coinbase is probably going to cost them.
  • asclepi 9y ago
    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.
    • thrownaway954 9y ago
      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.
  • dx034 9y ago
• newyankee 9y ago
  Hello, can i please DM you. I am in a similar but worse boat. I want to reach out to Kyle or someone else myself.
• tylersmith 9y ago
  This is a tale as old as Coinbase. No response until the customer calls them out publicly.
• elliottcarlson 9y ago
  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.
• SheinhardtWigCo 9y ago
  Threatening to contact the CFPB and FTC works too (speaking from experience)
  • fjsolwmv 9y ago
    The current President is closing down CFPB projects, to protect the free market.
• hw 9y ago
  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 get back to them once their issue has been investigated and resolved on our end. Every single employee at our company is responsible for making that happen, and we also help other businesses with the goal of a zero-inbox as well. 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
  • benbreen 9y ago
    I know, I started looking at the Coinbase subreddit for the first time last week and was just shocked. On "new" right now there are people who have waited for 4 months with no response, people with well over 10k locked up for over a month, people suffering from anxiety as a result of this company. Almost all of them have no responses beyond the automated message from a bot. 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!
  • rurounijones 9y ago
    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?
• kpennell 9y ago
  makes me ashamed to be a kyle!
• pwaai 9y ago
  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=buy%20bitcoin,tether https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=now%207-d&q=bu...
  • jyrkesh 9y ago
    > 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.