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Wow. This reminds me of my experience with Coinbase. I find it interesting that they don't see how troublesome all this is. There's a human on the other end of
by rodneyg_ 5y ago
Wow. This reminds me of my experience with Coinbase. I find it interesting that they don't see how troublesome all this is. There's a human on the other end of the technology, and shutting them out without a solid reason, or the ability to reasonable appeal is crazy.
- WrtCdEvrydy 5y agoSet your age to below 13 in Coinbase for a fun surprise. As soon as you click "update", you are insta-locked out of your account.
- bpodgursky 5y agoThe US legal code doesn't give them a ton of flexibility here. Coinbase has to push the boundaries of US legal code interpretation in plenty of other places... picking "letting pre-teens manage accounts" would be a dumb hill to die on.
- toomuchtodo 5y agoYou’d think that’d be prevented when they identity proof you with government identity credentials considering the immutability of your birth date.
- dotancohen 5y ago> the immutability of your birth date. Another falsehood programmers believe about dates. )) When immigrants move across borders, often if there is no record of date of birth the date used is the first of January on a best-guess year, and sometimes even the year is wrong. Later this information could be updated. I know of a case of a man whose birthday (immigrant from China) went from January 1st, 1900 to some date in the late 1890s upon documentation being found, just slightly before his 100th (living) birthday. There are, of course, also reasons for deliberately falsifying a birth date. Accessing an online service is one, false claim of benefits (e.g. pension) may be another, avoiding or enlisting in armed forces, purchasing age-restricted material, renting a hotel or vehicle, the list goes on. A robust system must account for these possibilities.
- ricardobayes 5y agoYes, but you are designing a system based on a once in 100,000 edge case. There is no reason why such odd and rare requests can't be handled in a customer support request.
- jimnotgym 5y ago...If your customer service team are sufficiently well staffed, trained and have escalation points. In the article the customer service team couldn't even read a decision made by 'The Back End Team'.
- vidarh 5y agoA more realistic case for you: People make far more mistakes than you think. Having done genealogy recently, the number of documents with people messing up their own birthdate or name is staggering. On top of the much larger number of registers where someone else have taken the information down wrong.
- evanb 5y agoOr when there's a difference in convention. For example, the European convention dd/mm/yy[yy] and the US convention mm/dd/yy[yy].
- wraptile 5y agoAs a dev I love seeing these. Makes me feel better about myself when these companies with seemingly infinite resources suck at engineering as much as I do
- saagarjha 5y agoThis seems like a policy, rather than engineering, decision.
- netcan 5y agoThis is the kind of statement that leads to this kind of a feature.
- saagarjha 5y agoIt's a policy decision regardless of whether you believe engineering should be making policy decisions (which they generally should, but I digress).
- netcan 5y agoTechnically/semantically correct. OTOH, this mentality reliably leads to these kinds of features, bugs, policies or whatever you like to call them. The software works perfectly. It's the spec that's broken. I'm going home.
- pmontra 5y agoYup, but when the age has been (let's say) 23 for an year and becomes 13, the software should smell a mistake. Of course I have no idea about the actual UI. It's a bad idea to ask for the age because it doesn't update after the birthday. A birth date is much better but it's also personal data and maybe not necessary. If all a site wants to know is if you're 18, just ask it and store a boolean. If you suddenly declare that you're not >= 18 anymore, especially after using the site for a while, smell a misclick on a checkbox, ask for confirmation and explain what's going to happen.
- bserge 5y agoTbf, I wouldn't want to deal with someone who can reverse age like that, either.
- johnisgood 5y agoQuite common. On Discord, there are NSFW channels and before joining them, you have to provide your birth date (only once). If you set it to below 13, your account gets suspended/locked immediately.
- yborg 5y agoTwitter does this as well.
- Andrex 5y agoWhen there's 1,000 happy customers and 1 unhappy one, what's the incentive to fix anything? Not being facetious, just pointing out the depressing nature of our reality. :/
- ovao 5y agoTo answer the question in the plainest way: the possible revenue potential from the unhappy customer if turned to a satisfied recurring customer. This is really just a question of the opportunity cost, which can vary.
- tux1968 5y agoThe depressing bit is that they can make a rational decision to weigh that cost against the amount of money it takes to keep people happy (vs doing nothing). Not that I support it, but they might be following the financially superior option. There's a lot of incentive to get that answer "correct", so I suspect it's currently working out in their favour, even though it sucks for those of us caught on the shitty side of that equation.
- ovao 5y agoWhile true that economies in their various forms can form unsympathetic relationships between producers and consumers, it seems that, broadly speaking, producers who align more strongly with consumer satisfaction tend to ‘win’ and those who broadly speaking don’t tend to ‘lose’ on a long-term basis. To their credit, Apple seems to get this mostly right.
- ctpide 5y agoCommonly the 1 unhappy customer might tell his story to ten of their friends or thousands+ of readers online. Fixing customer problems (especially drastic ones) carries large incentives, because those single stories will actually be observed, while the 1000 happy customers won‘t be mentioned.
- 5y ago
- smoldesu 5y agoI'm also locked out of my Coinbase account :( Don't know what to do, I'll just assume my investments are lost to time...
- young_unixer 5y agoThere's an old chinese proverb that goes: "Not your keys, not your coins"
- smoldesu 5y agoI'm not mad, I've still got my keys from 2014-ish. I only made a Coinbase account after a finance teacher in high school heard that I dabbled in crypto, and bet that he could build a better-yielding portfolio than I could. I logged onto Coinbase, spun up an account with $20 in it, and invested in Chainlink and Ether. Nowadays it's worth ~350 dollarydoos, which isn't absolutely necessary to retrieve. Honestly, it was worth it just to watch his enthusiasm crumble when his 30% APR high-risk portfolio paled in comparison to some dumbass high-schooler's prediction.
- toomuchtodo 5y agoFile a complaint with your state’s Attorney General, FINRA, the SEC, and NYDFS. Should help Coinbase along in recovering your account. Should take no more than an hour or two to file with all regulators I mentioned.
- sumedh 5y agoWhat about people who are not US citizens?
- posguy 5y agoI'm surprised OP mentioned New York State Department of Financial Services (NYFDS), but this might be the local regulator if Coinbase's home state is New York. I would still file with them, they can still escalate on your behalf since they are the regulator, or refer you to the agency you should file a complaint with.
- gzer0 5y agoI was banned from Coinbase 4 years ago, and I am still unable, to this day, to create an account without it being banned within 5 minutes of creation and no one is able to give a reason as to why.
- crooked-v 5y agoFrom having been behind the scenes of a web hosting company a while back: They almost certainly have decided that you're a scammer, and that any account you ever try to open is just an attempt to get around being banned for being a scammer. The complete non-answers from support are almost certainly because they have that as a standard policy with people they've decided are scammers, because the genuine scammers out there are extremely good at manipulating literally any kind of even vaguely permissive support policy into enabling further fraud. The bigger issue here is that when a company is actually good at this stuff (like that web hosting company I once worked for), there's a department specialized in handling these cases with knowledge of how to properly verify legal identities and filter out the scammers... but quite a few companies today both big and small have decided (possibly correctly, given how they're treated) that it's easier and more profitable to just skip that entirely and instead leave false positives locked out of the system permanently.
- Spooky23 5y agoYou may share a name with someone on a US Treasury, FDIC, FINRA or other banned list.
- TomSwirly 5y agoI went to school with someone named Jane Smith whose father was named John. In my life, I've known two Mike Wilsons, and when I knew one of them, there was also a cabinet minister called Mike Wilson (in Canada). Summary: if your company blocks someone based on their name only, your company is a bunch of incompetent losers.
- nullc 5y agoor it's complying with a US law or executive branch administrative policy that was set by a bunch of incompetent losers.
- jsemrau 5y agoWhen our bank replacements are run like tech companies everybody loses. I suffered through similar with Binance.
- adrr 5y agoTraditional banks will cut you off as well. Move lots of money through your account, bounce it between a few accounts and back into your account. They'll cut you off.
- jsemrau 5y agoThat is correct. Yet it doesn't make it good. Customer focused communication even though some indicator tell you to terminate the account should avoid a "The process" situation. This is 2021, we have many amazing communication tools available.
- YawningAngel 5y agoAt least in the UK, there are "tipping off" offences that make it very legally risky to tell people why they're suspended. Banks just tell their employees not to do it to avoid risk
- jimnotgym 5y agoIn the UK I can raise this with my bank and if they don't resolve it I can raise it with the regulator, who has real teeth. Getting back on topic, who regulates Apple?
- adrr 5y agoThere are bank regulators in the US, it is heavily regulated. Businesses are still free to choose who they want to do business with. Banks will get smacked down by regulators if they helped laundered money so they error on the side of caution. The fact that is heavily regulated is the root cause.
- ValentineC 5y ago
- actually_a_dog 5y agoIt doesn't matter if they lose one customer by mistake if they screen out multiple fraudulent accounts this way. It's simply more profitable to do this in an automated way than to actually consider the human in the equation.