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

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.

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...

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.

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.