Eventuslly I was up 5000 I decided to sell 10k so I could let the rest freeride. When I went to sell coinbase told me they couldn't validate my identity and wouldn't let me sell.
Which is ridiculous. They had no problem taking 10k from me, but not the other way around?
At the very least they should have put some info somewhere telling me that before I bought any.
Nothing I did worked. It just kept telling me it couldn't validate and to try again in 24hr. I contacted support and eventually got a boiler plate email.
Eventually I opened a new account on another exchange, sent my eth there and sold it for btc which I sold for usd on localbtc.
Ended up a 2000 dollar loss because this whole process took like a week or so during which eth kept dropping.
My advice to anyone using cb would be to have a local wallet and working accounts on multiple exchanges. If I had done that I would have been okay.
However I still think that if my identity was no sufficiently validated to sell, they should have told me before I went to sell.
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6933360
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5427985
4 years ago they had a problem with customer service and the situation does not appear to have improved:
> When it takes a public outcry on HN for a company to do their job, I no longer deal with such a company. Simple as that. I don't care if you raised $25 million - if you can't treat your users fairly, you deserve neither.
I wonder if that applies to Google too, the most famous company for which you need to get on the HN frontpage to actually reach someone there.
99% get an automatic Green flag. Only ~1% are manually reviewed.
if (Math.random() > 0.2) { // rate of false accounts at last review was ~20%
return false;
} else {
return true;
} return Math.random() <= 0.2Not my experience - no luck getting ID verified yet.
Fortune favored me this time around, but I don't know if I can trust coinbase again. If the price had dipped, I'd be out a bunch of money. (Just to be clear: they received the coins days ago, just didn't credit them to my wallet.) I wish there was an option to sell BTC directly from your local wallet, which would set a strike price and ensure that users don't get screwed if/when this sort of thing happens. (Note: This option may exist and I'm just not aware of it. I tried to log into coinbase just now to verify that ... but the site is down again.)
*In addition intermittent outages which prevented me from accessing their site, I sent some Satoshi from my local wallet to coinbase (10 days ago at time of writing) in order to unload some; transaction was marked "pending"; they've since sold the coins; customer support has stopped responding to my emails.