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Comment by raziel2701 | Hacker News Reader

Coinbase, a nasdaq listed company, handles customer support through its subreddit. What's more, a few weeks back a customer got scammed through coinbase's subreddit when his support request was answered by another user impersonating coinbase customer support, instructing the customer to move their coins to a wallet number they gave them in order to solve the issue. The customer lost $75k and there was nothing coinbase could do other than "sorry for your loss".

Here's the thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/CoinBase/comments/nhug9u/75000_just...

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The support is bad but this was phishing: how is it coinbase their fault?

Not to mention that most big companies have kafkesque awful support, but if they offer better for $0.01/year more, all their clients will go elsewhere. Bad support is only noticed when you got bitten and just not that a big % gets bitten, even if support is awful for almost all that needed such support (you need support, the bot chat does not work for you (apparently it works for people) and then you need to have a bad experience).

> The support is bad but this was phishing: how is it coinbase their fault?

Because they chose a support platform that makes it very easy for other people to impersonate them? We would laugh at a bank that was running their support out of /~foobank/ on a shared hosting provider, but reddit is pretty much the same thing.

Does a company worth $47 billion running customer support through reddit not raise giant red flags to you?

Yes, but so does no support at all at Google. We can, by now, for go the nonsense that it is a free service: they make money selling our data so we pay. And yet, no support. And there are more examples of huge companies not giving any or adequate support. Here in the EU Revolut is known for support horror shows too.

But yes, support via reddit is weird, I agree to that.

Google provides support roughly proportionately to how much you pay Google. Free-as-in-beer internet services tend to be offered as-is, and this is nothing unusual.

A financial firm providing support through reddit, on the other hand, is a bad joke.

Yeah but the services from Google are not free. So it is just what you put up with. But even when I was funneling 100s of 1000s of $ through then both ways (adsense and adwords), the support was nonexistent. But I see your point.

If the support would be good, reddit would not be that much of an issue, but yes, you are right that it is at least weird. Probably they think it is all OK in the free-spirited crypto world.

Both Google Workspace and Google One provide immediate support, as well as any additional premium services.

I smell a fresh wave of lawsuits in the crypto space with companies like Coinbase. Honestly, they just remind me of Robinhood during the GME fiasco. They are also a Y Combinator company too.

Robinhood did not go through y combinator.

No, Coinbase did. Sorry for the confusion.

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