Coinbase Multiple Charges | Hacker News Reader

Coinbase Multiple Charges

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144 pointssvdr35 comments

One of those situations where software bugs may (temporarily) ruin people's lives.

Many threads on this topic from people who had a relatively small amount to their name in their bank accounts, it was linked to Coinbase, and they now can't pay living expenses:

https://www.reddit.com/r/CoinBase/comments/7xot6y/freaking_o...

https://www.reddit.com/r/CoinBase/comments/7xspus/what_happe...

https://www.reddit.com/r/CoinBase/comments/7xs2zr/i_have_bee...

https://www.reddit.com/r/CoinBase/comments/7xsyf4/17x_charge...

https://www.reddit.com/r/CoinBase/comments/7xrq4k/welp_offic...

https://www.reddit.com/r/CoinBase/comments/7xq3xc/you_draine...

https://www.reddit.com/r/CoinBase/comments/7xrf02/3x_5x_how_...

https://www.reddit.com/r/CoinBase/comments/7xrfhs/double_cha...

Many more on that subreddit... and that's just from people who use Reddit.

Not to judge how people spend their money, but surprising how many people are buying crypto while they only seem to have a few hundred dollars in their bank account. Very risky putting in money it sounds like they can't afford to lose.

If it all comes crashing down at some point (which I don't expect, but is possible) I wonder what the ramifications are if millions of people are depending on whatever they have in their coinbase accounts to pay bills.

There is a difference from risking a few hundred dollars you can maybe afford to lose, and the remainder (unspent) of your bank account being overdrawn.

I'm fairly financially stable but I generally only keep a few hundred dollars in my checking account at any given time. The rest goes into long term savings of one sort or another, and it's not necessarily easy to convert back to petty cash on short notice.

Exactly, most of my extra money is automatically sent to my 401K and my brokerage account. I don't typically have much in my checking account and don't have a savings account because my bank offers a "whopping" 0.05% interest on my savings.

In my experience, landlords charge extra for paying my rent with a credit card, if that's even a possibility at all.

I think some of my utilities also have a surcharge if you use a credit card rather than a bank account. I do get cash back on my main credit card, but the surcharges are generally higher.

Savings accounts have a limit to how often you can withdraw, I think.

the money being lost is not their bitcoin investment but their checking account's balance. It doesn't make sense to me to keep large amounts on money in checking because you don't earn any interest and it takes time to transfer money from savings to checking. So it makes sense to me that some checking accounts are being completely emptied or overdrafted...

Here's one anecdote of $67,000 being removed: https://www.reddit.com/r/CoinBase/comments/7xsyf4/17x_charge...

It also doesn't make sense for you to keep money in a savings account, by the way. The difference in interest is minimal. I don't even bother.

But indeed, quite an annoying bug!

> It also doesn't make sense for you to keep money in a savings account, by the way.

The main point of a savings account is so that other people can't steal your money, like they can if it's in a checking account.

That's why you use a credit card for purchases and pay off that balance immediately with your checking account. US citizens are generally not liable for identity theft or fraud on their credit card[1]. This should keep your checking account safe. With current interest rates no one should have a savings account.

[1]: https://www.creditcards.com/credit-card-news/zero-liability-...

Get a checking account from a credit union instead of feeding banks that don't care about you. I get 1.5% APY on my checking account [1], and there are plenty of similar programs across the country.

https://www.kemba.com/accounts/personal-checking/get-green-r...

> surprising how many people are buying crypto while they only seem to have a few hundred dollars in their bank account

I don't think it is at all. Investing in a better future is a human need. They'd probably buy startup stock if they could, but that's been artificially held back by the SEC's racist regulations.

People should always have multiple accounts and the ones you use for online, including bank accounts and credit cards, should be limited and watched closely.

Only money needed for the next month's transactions should be in there, all other money should be moved to other accounts and investments.

Blows my mind when I hear about people with huge amounts in one single account, or these people doing big > $10k wire transfers. Better to do small chunks and limit exposure on your online accessible accounts to third party services.

Spread risk and money across accounts, banks, investment companies etc. Never have one of any sort that has your whole life in it.

Same goes with crypto, some in exchanges, some in hardware wallets, some in software wallets across multiple services.

100% agreed.

You're still not at fault if you don't do this, and have suffered as a result of this issue. You could have mitigated the impact to yourself by changing your flow / increasing the cost to yourself, but you're still not at fault if you didn't.

They aren't still using MongoDB to handle USD deposits / withdrawals are they? I know that was the root cause a few years back when this cropped up.

Edit: past context - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5428382

You would be surprised to learn what Stripe uses as their backend for pretty much everything then. And they appear to be doing fine.

I am surprised, but maybe I should just be impressed that MongoDB has progressed so far that this isn't a big deal all that often.

Two weeks this has been going on, apparently. Nothing on their blog, nothing on Twitter. No notifications to customers? Smells of an active attempt to keep the whole thing quiet.

They just posted on Twitter about it: https://twitter.com/coinbase/status/964248915695448064

Referring to wrong charge categorization due to MCC changes, not multiple charges though.

> Referring to wrong charge categorization due to MCC changes, not multiple charges though.

Not exactly. They are referring to "some customers recently were charged incorrectly". They identified the culprit as the MCC change which they call "downstream" of them.

The only thing that makes me think the current MCC message might not be relevant is that Reddit users seemed to be reporting multiple ACH charges against the same checking account. The previous MCC category change messaging suggested it would only affect credit cards. Perhaps that category change affects how the ACH API responds and the CoinBase system interpreted it as a "needs retry" kind of state.

After several hours of shaming their CS people on Reddit. "Oh, it's good that you're responding here to people complaining here about it to Reddit users. Because there's nothing on your Twitter, your main page, any email to customers, status pages, account information. That looks really bad."

And then they flurried to update things. Like the parent says, multiple issues for at least a week, and the first communication is responding to (some) people on Reddit, and only after they're called out do they think "Shit, we should probably tell our other customers, too". Wonder how many wouldn't have noticed?

TLDR: if you notice an unauthorized ACH charge, call your bank and dispute it ASAP! Time matters.

The scary thing about ACH is that your total possible exposure is not limited to the money in your account. Coinbase could do a $10,000 charge via ACH and in many cases even if you only had $100, the charge would go through.

HERE’S WHAT YOU CAN DO: for unauthorized ACH charges, every minute matters. If you call your bank and report the charge within 12-24 hours, you’re likely to have the charge reversed fairly quickly.

However, if it’s been more than 3-4 days since the charge, disputing and getting resolution to an ACH charge becomes more laborious and time-consuming.

Gotta love using trendy non-ACID databases for financial transactions and suddenly rediscovering why ACID databases were invented.

These guys are just crap now. Awful customer service as an example I have BTC stuck in their vault for 4 months now with no response to move it out.

It's been interesting to see the users of regulation-dodging services like Uber and Bitcoin slowly learn why those regulations came about in the first place.

I read another comment on hacker news today that referred to a type of regulation that is actually accountability.

Perhaps if we were able to classify regulation further it would be easier to analyze the tradeoffs of certain regulations rather than saying all regulation is bad or all regulation is good.

But if we do that we have to accept that there are tradeoffs in the first place. We have to recognize that reasonable people might disagree about which tradeoff to make. We have to accept that even good decisions are likely to leave someone somewhere worse off. We might even have to gasp understand the historical and cultural context in which the current system arose.

Applying a slogan is so much easier.

Uber et al should have thought about those tradeoffs. That's my point.

It's much easier to be binary. Thinking about tradeoffs is hard and can't be used for scoring political points.

I don't think this is a failure of regulation (or the lack thereof), but a QA/testing failure.

I imagine regulations are not there to prevent financial institutions from making mistakes, they are there to wreck those who do.

Actually this is another example of how regulation allows rent seeking rapacious incumbents like Coinbase to stay in business.

"Bu-bu-but it's too big to fail" (e.g. the banking crisis of 2008 and recent Equifax breach).

> Actually this is another example of how regulation allows rent seeking rapacious incumbents like Coinbase to stay in business.

I fail to see how "this is an example". Care to elaborate?

Rent seeking is traditionally used when it comes to regulatory capture or certain types of actions by monopoly companies. CoinBase, although large, is not the only place nor has it built a moat with lobbyists+regulators friendly to it.

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