Comment by ewillbefull | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ewillbefull | Hacker News Reader

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They only appear to care about the customer experience when someone complains on social media, until then they have a history of being jerks to their users.

They closed my account after I made a (relatively small) wire transfer after not using their service for a while. The year before I made much larger transfers that didn't seem to concern them. Suddenly I needed to provide them with lots of financial information.

The law sucks and I don't blame them for this. But I have provided them with more than enough information to prove all of my income is legitimate, including years of tax forms regarding the income and other crap they absolutely did not need to look at.

What bugs me is that they continued to ask me for this information, which took time for me to compile for them, and they ignored me anyway after I provided everything.

Another thing that bugs me is that (they claim) their support desk software is the most secure method of sending them sensitive documents. Ridiculous. The icing on the cake will be when their system is hacked and I lose a lot of important documents that I was under the impression they would be removing, but clearly haven't.

What's really odd about this (to me at least) is I've never had such an experience from any of my real banks.

Real banks will ask you for Driver Licenses and SSN when you open a bank account with them.

Information on DL has your height, eye color, address, telephone number, your photo, your finger prints. That's why they don't need to ask for your income again.

However, I tried Coinbase and will not use them ever again.

fingerprints on DL?

I guess they are likely to be on the card? Haha. Also phone number. Does any state DL actually have that?

I and many other fellow countrymen have had that experience with Itaú (largest bank in the southern hemisphere). Paypal seems to be a popular source of complaints regarding frozen accounts too.

Same here. I've been through the KYC loops and I know how invasive they have to be occasionally. Coinbase took it to another level.

But....did you use your Coinbase account to conduct any illegal transactions? You didn't answer a very straight forward question.

No, I didn't conduct any illegal transactions. I thought that would be obvious from my second comment. Somehow you believe I would waste my time complaining about Coinbase yet be at clear and obvious fault?

> I have provided them with more than enough information to prove all of my income is legitimate

That seems like a roundabout way of saying, "No, I did not conduct any illegal transactions".

You can buy drugs with legitimate income. The fact he didn't directly say no the first or second time says the answer is probably yes.

That's a dumb, deliberate misreading of my comment and a ridiculous jump to conclusions. I have done nothing illegal.

I said clearly that I made _one_ transaction (a wire transfer) and I said clearly that they questioned me on my income. Their concern is "where did you get your money" to which I answered them thoroughly.

I had no idea that KYC now has such onerous proof of income requirements. It's mind boggling.

No. It actually seems like a concise way of explaining how coinbase has been deficient in the commenter's experience.

That the transactions were believed to be legitimate was strongly implied in the same sentence, which just required a little deduction on your part.

Does it matter? In what world is Coinbase a judge, jury and executioner who can determine if a Bitcoin transaction is 'legal' or 'illegal' with absolute certainty?

The law absolutely requires them to stop doing business with - and report on - people who they have good reason to believe fall into money laundering, terrorist financing and other KYC financial crimes categories. Their safest - and cheapest - way to comply is use rather shallow and heavily automated systems to score their customers and react accordingly.

So we shouldn't judge a company for picking their own safety and cheapness over providing timely competent support to their customers?

I don't get the point of your comment.

What is an illegal transaction?

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