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Comment by cocktailpeanuts | Hacker News Reader

Coinbase has the worst customer service EVER. I once got locked out of my account, emailed them to their customer support line, three times. Never received any response.

I mean, we're not even talking about some trivial technical issue here. These guys have my real money, and I can't access them, and I try to reach them multiple times, but they just don't respond, I don't know how they get away with this behavior. When this happened I did some googling and looks like I'm not alone.

I ended up resolving it on my own somehow but have been looking for a different, safer service.

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> Coinbase has the worst customer service EVER.

You clearly weren't a customer of Mt.Gox.

Zing

They had good support. You can both have good support and run a scam. In fact it helps :)

> I don't know how they get away with this behavior.

They followed PayPal's lead.

I have experience with PayPal's customer service but that's nothing compared to this. My account got locked once on PayPal because I was making an international transaction and they thought it was suspicious. They froze my account and I couldn't touch the money for weeks until I sent my proof of identity and all kinds of stuff back and forth. But this is understandable at least. The customer service did respond when I called.

Coinbase had absolutely zero response from their so called customer service line.

Coinbase’s problem lately is that they can’t keep up with their growth. See this recent post:

https://blog.coinbase.com/improving-customer-support-139d99e...

For me, PayPal and GoDaddy have the worst customer service I have ever experienced. It is hard for me to pick which one is worse.

Hopefully we can all agree that Amazon has the best though :)

> I ended up resolving it on my own somehow but have been looking for a different, safer service.

Similar situation here. How did you get it resolved? Did you contact attorney? I assume if you keep serious cash (anything above $10k will do), then you find lawyers who take this pro bono. I doubt with all risk involved in cryptocurrency, Coinbase is looking out for bad PR.

Two things are going on here.

Firstly like everyone else they are currently experiencing absolutely ridiculous growth thanks to recent interest in Bitcoin/Ethereum/ICOs and it takes time to scale up support. (https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2015-05-09%202...)

Secondly, they are practically required to have terrible customer support in many situations due to banking regulations and practices, which they have no choice to abide unless they want their bank and credit card connections to be instantly shut off (as has happened to many Bitcoin businesses http://www.coindesk.com/wire-transfer-bitcoin-exchange-bitfi...).

> they are practically required to have terrible customer support in many situations due to banking regulations and practices

What do you mean by that? What are some examples?

In the case that they have any suspicion of illegal or even simply suspicious activity, even though they may be wrong, they must err on the side of caution and freeze and/or close accounts. "Illegal activity" may be something as innocuous as selling Bitcoin to friends, as that could run afoul of MSB laws. As another hypothetical example, accessing your Coinbase account when you are overseas could be seen suspicious as Coinbase may not be able to tell if you are there temporarily or have moved without telling them, and in the latter case all sorts of laws may apply.

In the case that they are forced to freeze or close accounts, they are probably not allowed to say why or give any recourse, which is incredibly frustrating for the person who may be wrongly affected.

Pretty sure what the practices you described have 0% basis in law/regulations and 100% ass-covering/terrible customer service.

That may or may not be true but it's the banks imposing these kinds of requirements, not Coinbase. Coinbase has no power to change banking practices so they must simply do what the banks require. Coinbase would probably love to let anyone do anything with their Bitcoin, but they would be shut down immediately.

This happened before the recent Bitcoin hype.

Also they have no excuse for not even responding in any way. I didn't do anything shady. I simply forgot my password so I tried to retrieve one. Unless trying to retrieve your forgotten password is considered a crime it doesn't make sense.

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