An ever increasing number of Coinbase customers are beginning to experience major problems with the worlds largest cryptocurrency exchange. Many are finding out the exchange has been conducting unauthorized withdrawals of users bank accounts, at times amounting to thousands of dollars. In some cases, this drained their linked bank accounts balances below zero, resulting in overdraft charges.
One situation in particular saw a user who purchased Bitcoin, Ether, and Litecoin for a total of $300 on February 9th get charged another five times for a total of $1,500, even though the user had not authorized any more purchases. That, however, was enough to clear out the user’s bank account which in turn was hit with NSF fees.
Coinbase has seen enormous growth in the past year, doubling their amount of users to 10 million from 2016 figures. But with the mass of new customers has come growing pains of an equal magnitude. With such a high load there are only 200 people employed by the company. And right now a full blown crisis is unfolding.
Numerous people have written on reddit about their bank accounts being drained and no response to their tickets from Coinbase support. Coinbase released a statement their saying: "We have determined that the erroneous credit and debit charges are the result of Visa reversing and recharging transactions. This was not done by Coinbase. We are working with Visa to ensure all affected customers are reimbursed."
However Visa responded back to the Coinbase statement, saying “Visa has not made any systems changes that would result in the duplicate transactions cardholders are reporting.” What was suppose to be an alleviating measure has backfired into utter pandemonium as user continue to be left in the dark about the whereabouts of their funds.
Understandably, Coinbase customers are upset. The lack of clear information and contradictory statements means that anxiety is high, especially when many people are relying on the money in their bank to pay bills and put food on the table. However long the process of issuing refunds ends up taking, coupled with assurances and possible compensation, will determine if many people will even continue to use the platform. Yet it is becoming increasingly clear that many will not be returning to Coinbase ever again.
