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Comment by gt_ | Hacker News Reader

I have recommended Coinbase to many people. But, a few days ago, I had a double charge on my bank account from them and have learned since that their customer support is essentially non-existent. It’s been 8 days with no response by e-mail, their posted phone number results in a busy signal, and the alternate numbers I found posted on forums go straight to hold music before hanging up after a couple of minutes. I filed a fraud report with my bank.

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I am on my fifth month of waiting for my account to be unfrozen so I can withdraw my funds. I managed to get through once by phone (was assured that the issue was being resolved) and once via email (same) but for the past two months, nothing. I believe the CEO and probably several other employees are on HN so if any of them see this - please get your act together. Scaling is great but customer support needs to come along for the ride first.

If anyone is wondering, this happened because I accidentally opened the app while on vacation in a country that the US sanctions.

Haha they made you a lot of money by waiting this long!

Technically he won't have made any money until he sells, which it doesn't seem like is going to be possible anytime soon

It went from being two figures to three figures, so we're not talking about a lot. I'm more mad about having spent a total of around 5 hours waiting on hold at this point - makes my experiences with Comcast customer service seem hyper efficient by comparison!

I have had a case open with them since May 6th of this year, and have not heard a thing back other than their automated replies.

They froze my account, required that I pay them money to even get access to my transaction history, and then when I did (foolish, I know) the records don't show any reason for me to have owed them money.

It wasn't a large amount (<$50), but I'm still pretty upset about it.

I have moved to another platform.

It's not a unique issue either, just look at all the posts on the Coinbase subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/CoinBase/

If you live in America, consider complaining to your state financial services regulator. New York's Department of Financial Services [1], for example, is well-known for its teeth.

[1] http://www.dfs.ny.gov/consumer/fileacomplaint.htm

I had a similar experience as well. Tried to call support and they had a prerecorded message telling you to go away, you're fucked, unless you're calling about an account takeover.

It reminds me of the time Washington DC had a baby earthquake and verizon's network promptly fell over. When it flops under non apocalyptic loads, you get a dark glimpse of the inevitable catastrophe when the big one rolls around.

When (not if) the next bank run occurs, you'd better hope you can get yours via the vanilla coinbase UI, because you will be all on your own. (FWIW I have money in coinbase after this experience, but only an amount that would not cause me to need therapy were it to catch on fire)

Their customer service was great in the early days, but has most definitely gotten worse since its gotten so popular. I think they simply can't find enough people.

They should consider paying more to find a suitable equilibrium.

Easy to say, until you need to train enough customer service reps to handle an average of 30,000 users per day!

That doesn't exactly happen overnight.

Well, people already complain about the fees they charge

Everyone is commenting how great their cash flow must be upthread-- regardless, it hardly matters.

If supporting your customer base makes the business unprofitable then you don't (yet) have a viable business model.

You can always find enough people, by paying them.

It may be that your bank is charging you an international transaction fee and that is the second charge you are seeing. This happened to me the other day with Coinbase. If you buy from Coinbase with a credit card the transaction actually gets processed in London. Some American banks will charge you a 3% fee for this international transaction. So it will look like Coinbase has charged you twice, but actually the second charge is from your bank.

The second charge is actually an amount identical to the first charge, only 1 minute later. It was a couple hundred dollars.

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