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Coinbase users slam new customer service phone support: ‘It was a joke’

30 points by koolba 5y ago

mensetmanusman 5y ago
Crypto is hard because there are nation states like NK that have entire teams dedicated to trying to steal from random persons that have lots of coins. The benefit of crypto also makes it a perfect target since there is no ‘undo’. We are relearning why the financial system is set up as it is …
- 0x000000001 5y ago
  Sounds fascinating actually. Any good articles you recommend about NK doing this?
  - spinchange 5y ago
    "North Korean hackers steal billions in cryptocurrency. How do they turn it into real cash? – MIT Technology Review" https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/09/10/1008282/north-korea-hackers-money-laundering-cryptocurrency-bitcoin/amp/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/09/10/1008282/north-ko...
smoldesu 5y ago
I have quite a few coins stuck in Coinbase, I've basically given up on ever getting them back. It makes me incredibly sad knowing that I have a small fortune tucked away but can't access it because the sites support is so useless.
randomhodler84 5y ago
Don’t leave coins in exchanges! It is this simple. Cryptocurrency teaches you bitter truths about reality; No do overs. Look after your shit yourself. You can’t trust anyone with your property except yourself.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  That's a one way of trying to put a positive spin on “cryptocurrency spends a lot of resources to prevent the social technologies developed over the length of human history for securing property from working with it, because it has a supposedly superior technical solution to the problem which...doesn't work nearly as well.”
  - randomhodler84 5y ago
    Yes. I don’t want any of those social technologies, they are bad. I want money where nobody can spend it except for knowledge of 256bit integers. Securing property with ints is better than anything else we have ever come up with. It makes many bad things much harder and less likely.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - P18g4rKns6Q 5y ago
    My understanding was that BTC was to provide permissionless transactions on a public ledger, not replace "the social technologies developed over the length of human history for securing property." Those social technologies haven't worked out great recently I might add https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-06-01/bank-of-america-fixes-ordered-after-hacked-customers-go-hungry https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-06-01/bank-of-a... https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/29/business/capital-one-data-breach-hacked.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/29/business/capital-one-data...
- P18g4rKns6Q 5y ago
  The thing is, now there are a lot of ways to earn interest on your crypto holdings, not just yield farming but simple products like exchanges offering compound interest on your balances. You have to weigh the risk of theft vs the financial losses from holding your money in a place that it does not earn interest (and in fact loses value to inflation). I say that as someone that lost quite a bit when Cryptsy went down.
mtnGoat 5y ago
Coinbase, taking a play from PayPal. It’s disgusting to me that these companies hold billions in others’ wealth but don’t think it’s a problem to not have proper support until they are absolutely forced to.
- jiveturkey 5y ago
  Well, it's not a problem. Not that Coinbase is a monopoly (far from it), but this is what market power looks like.
- mritun 5y ago
  There are two views about the problem of fraud in the crypto world: 1. Intermediaries should make up for the unintentional losses. 2. Let it play out as the crypto promised. It’s DiFi after all. There are no chargebacks, no insurance, no tracking, no government intervention. Suck up the losses and keep playing. For now, it’s #2. If and when regulations come for #1, then crypto would look a lot like the commodities market. Every person making a crypto transaction would likely also have to follow KYC procedures and submit ID and file W8/W9. There’s no free lunch.
  - Tenoke 5y ago
    This has nothing to do with Coinbase. CB is not DeFi.
- toss1 5y ago
  >>It [Coinbase Support] is a joke Indeed! But it is not funny. This is far less bad than the people in the article, but the Coinbase system had me locked out from May until August for an utterly trivial error - their Plaid system couldn't resolve the type of bank acct or account name, so I couldn't transfer in or out, despite having been a customer since 2015. Opening dozens of support tickets and emails attempting to resolve the problem got either auto-responses, or generic boilerplate replies - it was literally impossible to get anyone to actually look at the problem, and I pretty much gave up. Finally, to their credit, in August, a person actually looked at it, and had me use the old two deposits of $0.xx and tell them the amounts, and boom- I was verified again. They would have saved everyoe a ton of trouble (and not cost me large opportunity costs) by simply having this as a fallback option on the menu. Even though it takes a few days to transfer, I prefer it to the massively insecure Plaid option anyway. The bad UX design is enough of a problem, but their lack of support when real money is involved is inexcusable — no support for a search engine, fine, but with real money, nope. There really ought to be a law requiring specific service levels when money is involved... If they weren't pretty much the only game in town in the US...
saurik 5y ago
My experience with Coinbase support was so bad--with them simply giving me obviously-wrong answers in a loop--that I would have been happier had they simply not offered support at all, as it would have wasted less of my time.
- soganess 5y ago
  My tin-foil brain thinks this is by design. But not "tell the call center folks to lie," conspiracy design. More like: Find the cheapest call center that is already leveraged really thin with clients. Then get someone in dev who is overworked and not used to writing outside docs to write the scripts/workflows. Of course, give that person an unreasonably short schedule to finish because they have "better things to do." Finally, fingers-crossed nothing blows up... monkey-patch when it inevitably does. Repeat with each new feature rollout... It seems like the steady-state for this is customers realizing the call-center folks don't have any real info and stop calling.
zht 5y ago
has anyone considered interviewing and getting a job at Coinbase to free up their coins?

30 points by koolba 5y ago

Crypto is hard because there are nation states like NK that have entire teams dedicated to trying to steal from random persons that have lots of coins. The benefit of crypto also makes it a perfect target since there is no ‘undo’. We are relearning why the financial system is set up as it is …

0x000000001 5y ago
Sounds fascinating actually. Any good articles you recommend about NK doing this?
- spinchange 5y ago
  "North Korean hackers steal billions in cryptocurrency. How do they turn it into real cash? – MIT Technology Review" https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/09/10/1008282/north-korea-hackers-money-laundering-cryptocurrency-bitcoin/amp/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/09/10/1008282/north-ko...

smoldesu 5y ago

I have quite a few coins stuck in Coinbase, I've basically given up on ever getting them back. It makes me incredibly sad knowing that I have a small fortune tucked away but can't access it because the sites support is so useless.

randomhodler84 5y ago

Don’t leave coins in exchanges! It is this simple. Cryptocurrency teaches you bitter truths about reality; No do overs. Look after your shit yourself. You can’t trust anyone with your property except yourself.

dragonwriter 5y ago
That's a one way of trying to put a positive spin on “cryptocurrency spends a lot of resources to prevent the social technologies developed over the length of human history for securing property from working with it, because it has a supposedly superior technical solution to the problem which...doesn't work nearly as well.”
- randomhodler84 5y ago
  Yes. I don’t want any of those social technologies, they are bad. I want money where nobody can spend it except for knowledge of 256bit integers. Securing property with ints is better than anything else we have ever come up with. It makes many bad things much harder and less likely.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- P18g4rKns6Q 5y ago
  My understanding was that BTC was to provide permissionless transactions on a public ledger, not replace "the social technologies developed over the length of human history for securing property." Those social technologies haven't worked out great recently I might add https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-06-01/bank-of-america-fixes-ordered-after-hacked-customers-go-hungry https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-06-01/bank-of-a... https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/29/business/capital-one-data-breach-hacked.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/29/business/capital-one-data...
P18g4rKns6Q 5y ago
The thing is, now there are a lot of ways to earn interest on your crypto holdings, not just yield farming but simple products like exchanges offering compound interest on your balances. You have to weigh the risk of theft vs the financial losses from holding your money in a place that it does not earn interest (and in fact loses value to inflation). I say that as someone that lost quite a bit when Cryptsy went down.

mtnGoat 5y ago

Coinbase, taking a play from PayPal. It’s disgusting to me that these companies hold billions in others’ wealth but don’t think it’s a problem to not have proper support until they are absolutely forced to.

jiveturkey 5y ago
Well, it's not a problem. Not that Coinbase is a monopoly (far from it), but this is what market power looks like.
mritun 5y ago
There are two views about the problem of fraud in the crypto world: 1. Intermediaries should make up for the unintentional losses. 2. Let it play out as the crypto promised. It’s DiFi after all. There are no chargebacks, no insurance, no tracking, no government intervention. Suck up the losses and keep playing. For now, it’s #2. If and when regulations come for #1, then crypto would look a lot like the commodities market. Every person making a crypto transaction would likely also have to follow KYC procedures and submit ID and file W8/W9. There’s no free lunch.
- Tenoke 5y ago
  This has nothing to do with Coinbase. CB is not DeFi.
toss1 5y ago
>>It [Coinbase Support] is a joke Indeed! But it is not funny. This is far less bad than the people in the article, but the Coinbase system had me locked out from May until August for an utterly trivial error - their Plaid system couldn't resolve the type of bank acct or account name, so I couldn't transfer in or out, despite having been a customer since 2015. Opening dozens of support tickets and emails attempting to resolve the problem got either auto-responses, or generic boilerplate replies - it was literally impossible to get anyone to actually look at the problem, and I pretty much gave up. Finally, to their credit, in August, a person actually looked at it, and had me use the old two deposits of $0.xx and tell them the amounts, and boom- I was verified again. They would have saved everyoe a ton of trouble (and not cost me large opportunity costs) by simply having this as a fallback option on the menu. Even though it takes a few days to transfer, I prefer it to the massively insecure Plaid option anyway. The bad UX design is enough of a problem, but their lack of support when real money is involved is inexcusable — no support for a search engine, fine, but with real money, nope. There really ought to be a law requiring specific service levels when money is involved... If they weren't pretty much the only game in town in the US...

saurik 5y ago

My experience with Coinbase support was so bad--with them simply giving me obviously-wrong answers in a loop--that I would have been happier had they simply not offered support at all, as it would have wasted less of my time.

soganess 5y ago
My tin-foil brain thinks this is by design. But not "tell the call center folks to lie," conspiracy design. More like: Find the cheapest call center that is already leveraged really thin with clients. Then get someone in dev who is overworked and not used to writing outside docs to write the scripts/workflows. Of course, give that person an unreasonably short schedule to finish because they have "better things to do." Finally, fingers-crossed nothing blows up... monkey-patch when it inevitably does. Repeat with each new feature rollout... It seems like the steady-state for this is customers realizing the call-center folks don't have any real info and stop calling.

zht 5y ago

has anyone considered interviewing and getting a job at Coinbase to free up their coins?