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Tell HN: Coinbase is stealing my money from me
2 points by cozuya on June 21, 2020 | hide | past | favorite | 2 comments
Many years ago I created an account and bought crypto from https://coinbase.com and have since sat on it.

Lately I've been receiving emails from them that their terms of service has changed and I need to upload a US drivers license and a "selfie" in order to access my now locked account.

I will not be doing that - I don't trust third parties with my government ID, and "upload selfies for security" is the definition of security theater as well as being invasive and dehumanizing. I would not have opened the account with those requirements.

I understand that it is their prerogative to change their TOS, but in response I've asked them to close my account and either send me the crypto or the current value in USD. I don't think that's an unreasonable solution.

They are refusing to honoring that request after several months and several requests to escalate. But they are continuing to send me "we're going to confiscate your account if you don't comply" form emails.

What now? Yikes.



Ignoring the specifics of this issue and the specifics that you're in a dispute with Coinbase:

Escalate this out of their CS queues. The most straightforward way is to involve their legal department, either by sending a letter that will be routed into it or having a lawyer send them a nastygram [0], which will cost somewhere between $100 and $300.

[0] Lawyers would typically call it a "demand letter", which would simply observe that they're your counsel, that the financial institution has your money and has refused to return it when asked, and that the financial institution should pay you your money immediately.


KYC (“Know Your Customer”) laws require this. Blame the US government, not Coinbase.




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