Coinbase Using Security Check Fund Holds To Defraud Customers?

On Wednesday the 20th I decided to take advantage of the high Steem Dollar price, and sell some of my hard earned SBD on Polinex.

Up to this point everything went fine, but after I transferred the purchased Bitcoins to CoinBase, the problems began...

After creating a new account, and verifying the account with photo ID and Two-Factor verification, I sold the Bitcoins on CoinBase, paying a £3.95 transaction fee for the pleasure, it was only then that I discovered their website would not accept my banks Swift/Bic code. The code used was definately valid as I copied it directly from a bank statement.

Unable to withdraw the funds gained from selling my Bitcoins, and lacking any way to contact a support team, my only option was to buy back the BitCoins and transfer them to LocalBitcoins, before selling them there. Biting the bullet and swallowing yet another round of CoinBase fees, I bought back the Bitcoin, further diminishing my earnings.

I then tried to Transfer the BitCoin to LocalBitcoins, but Coinbase put a "Security Hold" on my outbound Bitcoin tranfer for 72 hours. This is depite the fact that my account was brand new and had just been verified using photo ID and Two-Factor authentication.

Bitcoin was in the middle of a massive downward trend when CoinBase placed this suspiciously profitable and wholly unjustified "Security Hold". I can think of no reason why an exchange would place such a hold on a newly created and verfied account that they had just approved, other than to skim funds. Coinbase stand to make massive profits by pulling this sort of stunt on multiple customers at the same time.

My advise is to avoid CoinBase like the plague, don't make the same mistake I did, just head to over to LocalBitcoins.com and save yourself some time and money!