As soon as you click "update", you are insta-locked out of your account.
Coinbase has to push the boundaries of US legal code interpretation in plenty of other places... picking "letting pre-teens manage accounts" would be a dumb hill to die on.
> the immutability of your birth date.
When immigrants move across borders, often if there is no record of date of birth the date used is the first of January on a best-guess year, and sometimes even the year is wrong. Later this information could be updated. I know of a case of a man whose birthday (immigrant from China) went from January 1st, 1900 to some date in the late 1890s upon documentation being found, just slightly before his 100th (living) birthday.
There are, of course, also reasons for deliberately falsifying a birth date. Accessing an online service is one, false claim of benefits (e.g. pension) may be another, avoiding or enlisting in armed forces, purchasing age-restricted material, renting a hotel or vehicle, the list goes on. A robust system must account for these possibilities.
Besides, Even with 1 in 100k, with the US population of 330 million, you've created trouble for 3 300 people based on this edge case alone.
Since we're in the middle of a bad customer service with no appeal discussion... can we assume you are joking?
(She was born in Greece in 1920- AFAIK Greece was the last country to switch from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar, and did so in 1923.)
When he was 15, his parents decided it was time for him to start driving his mother around, who never learned how to drive. They wrote down his birth year to make him appear 16. The Texas Department of Public Safety in the 60s wasn’t quite as strict about proof of identity as it is now.
Fast forward to the late 90s, and digitized driver’s licenses. Fortunately, my mother had an inkling that life for my dad might get a bit complicated with a driver's license that didn’t match his birth certificate, so she pushed him to get it corrected.
I imagine there are at least several thousand US citizens who have never lived elsewhere whose primary ID (driver’s license) shows a different birth year from the one on their birth certificates for similar reasons, and it’s a toss-up on which date they use for various purposes.
There are people who escaped war zones with no papers behin
Syrians in Germany, Bosnians in Arizona and many other such examples in the UK.
They often provide 1.1.year as dob.
That date ended up on their marriage certificate.
And then, after her husband passed away and she was approaching pension age, she realised she would only be eligible for the pension a few years later...
So DOB is not immutable.
(and another common source of DOB errors, mixing up the US MM-DD-YYYY versus the normal DD-MM-YYYY format used almost everywhere else...)
The software works perfectly. It's the spec that's broken. I'm going home.
Of course I have no idea about the actual UI. It's a bad idea to ask for the age because it doesn't update after the birthday. A birth date is much better but it's also personal data and maybe not necessary. If all a site wants to know is if you're 18, just ask it and store a boolean. If you suddenly declare that you're not >= 18 anymore, especially after using the site for a while, smell a misclick on a checkbox, ask for confirmation and explain what's going to happen.
(Assuming there is a save button on the screen and it’s not an auto save on an input change, in which case yes it needs a confirmation dialog)
some years ago the Danish electrical company Dong (wonderful name they've since changed for 'reasons') sent me a message - give us a meter reading for your house or we will send someone around to do it and it will cost you some money, so I figured fine I don't have to do anything they do it for me for money!
next year, the same thing.
third year, the same thing. In Christmas of the third year when I was in Berlin I got an email from Dong, you owe us 15 thousand dollars (approx. translating from dkk in head), then later same day you owe us 18 thousand dollars, and finally next morning you owe us 20 thousand dollars.
So naturally I called them up and said I sure would like to know what you all are thinking (which was a lie, I didn't really want to know but I figured I better find out anyhow)
So they said they had sent someone by to read our meter and we had used more electricity and they wanted their money or they were turning it off. So I said you think I used 20 thousand extra dollars in a year?
No, the meter hasn't been read for three years and this is your fault because when we send you a notice to go read the meter you have a moral obligation to do that.
I asked what about their moral obligation to go read the meter when they said they would (which point they did not understand) but anyway since I was supposed to pay 3 thousand dollars a year (which is somewhat high for a Danish family of 3) and paid that it seemed highly unlikely that I had managed to use over two times more than I was estimated to use per year without an increase in population of the house.
It took a lot of arguing to convince them that somehow there was something fishy in the situation and they might have made a mistake, before they would put it to off closing the electricity and do an investigation.
Some months of investigation later, which involved me going to take pictures of my meter etc., it turned out they had read the wrong meter.
tldr: even obvious discrepancies that systems could easily be set to catch will not be caught and you will have to do the work to fix the problems of the organizations providing you services.
"Our policy is to make it as easy as possible to destroy your account forever with no warning."
Not being facetious, just pointing out the depressing nature of our reality. :/
This is really just a question of the opportunity cost, which can vary.
To their credit, Apple seems to get this mostly right.
20 years ago DHL told me the credit cards I was waiting for in Santa Cruz, California were suddenly in transit to South Korea.
As a one off it was a funny story. 10 years later they told me the computer that was sitting in a depot in London was on a ship back to the US.
I'll keep telling those stories until everyone involved had long since retired.
The complete non-answers from support are almost certainly because they have that as a standard policy with people they've decided are scammers, because the genuine scammers out there are extremely good at manipulating literally any kind of even vaguely permissive support policy into enabling further fraud.
The bigger issue here is that when a company is actually good at this stuff (like that web hosting company I once worked for), there's a department specialized in handling these cases with knowledge of how to properly verify legal identities and filter out the scammers... but quite a few companies today both big and small have decided (possibly correctly, given how they're treated) that it's easier and more profitable to just skip that entirely and instead leave false positives locked out of the system permanently.
In my life, I've known two Mike Wilsons, and when I knew one of them, there was also a cabinet minister called Mike Wilson (in Canada).
Summary: if your company blocks someone based on their name only, your company is a bunch of incompetent losers.
So yeah I agree it sucks, but the issue is not that every company which complies with OFAC is an incompetent loser. It's that the USA has declared a few countries as enemies and has some tough laws to enforce this both domestically and within its sphere of influence (foreign transactions with a "US nexus"[0] fall under OFAC). If I recall there's no upper bound on the fines for contravening OFAC and there's no leniency for accidentally breaking it even though you demonstrably tried to identify people, or were tricked. So these companies are incentivized to err on the side of extreme caution.
[0] - this is a fun one, iirc this can mean obvious things like "a company has a subsidiary or office in the USA", or "a transaction was conducted in USD" or even "an American citizen was in the room when the transaction was performed".
Many things are more difficult for “John Smith” because of this sort of bullshit.
What did Binance do to you?
Don't know what to do, I'll just assume my investments are lost to time...
I would still file with them, they can still escalate on your behalf since they are the regulator, or refer you to the agency you should file a complaint with.