Coinbase Customer Service Complaints Continue, Bitcoin Users Struggle

Coinbase Customer Service Complaints Continue, Bitcoin Users Struggle

​Recently, sources revealed that Coinbase is set to raise a $100 million funding round based on a $1 billion valuation. Officially, Coinbase became the first startup in the bitcoin and cryptocurrency industries to achieve a billion dollar valuation.

#bitcoin exchange & wallet platform Coinbase to raise funding at $1 billion valuation. Last week, Coinbase registered 40,000 users in 1 day. pic.twitter.com/VFXQKVpVFI

— Joseph Young (@iamjosephyoung) June 3, 2017

Yet, despite its sheer size and 7.5 million user base, Coinbase is struggling to provide an efficient and organized customer service. In the past week, multiple users have expressed their concerns over the inefficiency of Coinbase and the struggles of users on the platform.

On June 1, virtual reality (VR) studio IRL founder Cody Brown fell victim to a hack that led to a loss of around $8,000 worth of bitcoin, Litecoin and Ethereum on Coinbase. The hack itself was a result of poor security measures on his Coinbase account and Brown’s Verizon mobile phone. Brown admitted that his Coinbase account wasn’t protected with two-factor authentication (2FA) and that his Verizon mobile phone did not have fraud prevention and other security systems in place

The hack can’t be attributed to the weak security measures of Coinbase as users are recommended to use 2FA and other forms of security systems Coinbase provides. The actual issue in Brown’s case was Coinbase’s inefficient customer service.

One working theory which Brown presented to potentially explain the hacking attack on his account was that Brown fell victim to an attack after trying to help a friend of his who also had issues with his Coinbase account. In a blog post, Brown wrote that his friend couldn’t receive any help from Coinbase customer service after multiple days.

“The best working theory for why I was targeted was this tweet I made last week about Coinbase.com. A friend of a friend was hacked on Coinbase and he had not heard back from anyone on Coinbases’s support team for multiple days. As a plea for help, he asked people to help get the word out on Twitter,” said Brown.

When Brown also reached to Coinbase to receive help in regard to the recent theft of his cryptocurrencies on Coinbase, a bot replied to Brown saying that it could take weeks for him to receive help from the Coinbase team.

“The official Coinbase Support twitter has responded once, then a bot emailed, with a disclosure that it could be weeks before I get a single response to my question,” wrote Brown.

Coinbase’s inefficient customer service is widely known within the cryptocurrency and bitcoin communities. Recently, a user of an online bitcoin community revealed that Coinbase responded to an April 25 support ticket on June 1, over a month after the ticket was filed.

Coinbase has been experiencing an exponential growth rate, adding 400,000 users in a month and on some days, adding 40,000 users on a single day. However, there are applications and platforms that provide similar operations to Coinbase such as Coins that serve millions of users. Yet, Coins, which is funded by some of the most prominent venture capital firms that recently secured a $10 million Series A funding round, vows to respond to users and support tickets within three hours to ensure that beginner users and casual traders receive the help they need.

Arguably, Coinbase is one of the most influential and widely utilized bitcoin platforms and wallets in the world. If it fails to provide the service bitcoin users need at urgent times, bitcoin users could become increasingly impatient with the platform and bitcoin as a whole.

Author : Joseph Young

Joseph Young is a finance and tech journalist based in Hong Kong. He has worked with leading media and news agencies in the technology and finance industries, offering exclusive content, interviews, insights and analysis of cryptocurrencies, innovative and futuristic technologies.