Well! where do I start?
Okay I will start from Bitcoin Segwit Hardfork, which took place on August 1st, 2017. I have been a loyal customer for Coinbase since March 2017. I have bought my first Bitcoin in March through Coinbase and since then I have been trading on and off on GDAX (A Coinbase's Trading Platform). I am very satisfied with Coinbase and GDAX the User Interface of both are very easy to understand. An ordinary person who don't know how to trade can also understand it at a glance such great is their platform.
Okay, I will stop praising Coinbase here and start what I wanted to say through this article. So Coinbase clearly said that both coinbase and GDAX won’t be supporting Segwit and won’t be issuing BCH to its customers. So, I have transferred my 1.05 BTC to Kraken before August 1st so that I will receive equivalent BCH. I have kept my BTC on Kraken on the day of hardfork and even after that I left my funds on it. Somewhere in mid-September I withdrew my BTC from Kraken and left my 1.05 BCH on kraken. Everything looks good until Last week of October when I was shocked to see my account was blocked and I was unable to access my account. I received a call on November 2nd claiming themselves as Kraken support and said that my account is compromised and someone is trying to access my account from Russia. It was sketchy the way he talked, made me suspicious. And I disconnected the call saying that I am busy at the moment and researched online about kraken customer support by which I clearly got to know that kraken doesn't have support over phone. I tried to login to my account next day and to my surprise account was disabled. I have contacted customer support and raised a ticket through email which is only way to contact Customer Support (This Sucks). A guy Named Robert was assigned to help me with the issue. Finally, I got access to my account and first thing I did when I logged in was to check my funds (1.05 BCH), Its not there instead there was 0.0769 BTC. Frustrated and not knowing what to do I have contacted support again through email. Every time I contact the support I get one email reply that took two days. So, with all the patience I waited and waited and waited forever to know that the guy who tried to access my account traded my 1.05 BCH to 0.0769 BTC and as per my understanding he converted BCH to BTC so that it would be easy to steal BTC. Well after he traded BCH to BTC, Kraken acted (After the damage has already happened) and blocked my account. So, this was happened without my involvement and when I had no access to my account. If I have had access to my account I would have done something to secure my funds. Now BCH value has sky rocketed and trading between 1200 and 1300 USD. And I only have 500 USD worth BTC on my Kraken Account. Also, there is withdrawal hold on my account which wouldn't allow me to withdraw the 0.0769 BTC which is on my account. I am in middle of nowhere with my funds in air. I lost both money and my valuable time. I asked kraken support for a solution with a small hope that I would be compensated for my lost funds. They simply said, "You can trade the BTC that you have on your account to get equivalent BCH". By doing math I will only get 0.38 BCH.
So, my question is how would a big exchange like Kraken cannot secure user accounts and act before the damage instead of giving pointless suggestions to users.
Kraken if you are reading this: Your customer support sucks. You lost my trust and I won’t be suggesting my friends to use Kraken now on. I will explain them what i had gone through and ask them to withdraw all their funds from Kraken. Well, that’s at least I can do.
