
Ask HN: Recourse with Coinbase inexplicably disabling and freezing account? - lisbakke
For one month my trading is disabled and my money is locked in Coinbase and I haven&#x27;t been notified why. I can&#x27;t get any support staff to help unblock it or explain why it&#x27;s blocked in the first place.<p>I&#x27;ve been running a bot that uses ML on Coinbase since February. I don&#x27;t partake in any illegal activity. The bot is successful, and I have good 30-day trailing volume.<p>On June 26th I received an email from Coinbase Support:<p>https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pastebin.com&#x2F;hfBvEwcV<p>They disabled my ability to transfer any of my funds and to trade. My money is locked in the platform!<p>I&#x27;ve responded to this message and had dead silence. After multiple attempts to reach out to their support, I received a message from them on July 12th (16 days after being locked!):<p>https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pastebin.com&#x2F;TEQFCfEA<p>It&#x27;s now ONE MONTH since the original email, and TWO WEEKS since they said they would follow up. I&#x27;ve made more support tickets and contacted their twitter accounts. I&#x27;m getting dead silence.<p>I thought Coinbase was the safe and mature platform for US traders to trade on? My money is locked in the platform and I haven&#x27;t been notified why.<p>Do you guys have any advice?<p>UPDATE:<p>I called into their hotline (didn&#x27;t realize I could call in) and made no progress. Their general support staff, and supervisor, were in the dark as to why the &quot;specialist&quot; had not finished reviewing my case. They didn&#x27;t know when the &quot;specialist&quot; would be done nor why my account had been disabled in the first place.<p>They best they could do was send the &quot;specialist&quot; another email to ask how things were going -- but there will be no visibility on that to me.
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readandweep
I was in a similar situation months ago, and then I filed a complaint with the
CFPB and my issue was dealt with the next day.

[https://www.consumerfinance.gov/](https://www.consumerfinance.gov/)

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lisbakke
Thanks a lot for this!

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justboxing
I would suggest posting on 1 or more of the sub-reddits. In the past, I've
seen exchanges ( GDAX, Bitstamp etc) respond to threads if it lands on the
front page.

It looks like
[https://www.reddit.com/r/CoinBase/](https://www.reddit.com/r/CoinBase/) is
being moderated by Coinbase employees, so posting there may or may not work...

Try the others like
[https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoMarkets/](https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoMarkets/)
and/or
[https://www.reddit.com/r/cryptocurrency/](https://www.reddit.com/r/cryptocurrency/)

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mancerayder
How long has your account been open? Did you already get everything verified
(ID)? And are you in the US or outside?

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lisbakke
Coinbase account has been open since October 2013, and I was trading on Gdax
since February 2018.

I'm a US citizen inside of the US and I am verified.

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mancerayder
That's crazy. Now I'm worried about my own account. :-/

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lisbakke
You should be!

I just called 10 minutes ago and got a general support staff on the phone and
then later escalated to a support supervisor -- they said it is in the hands
of the "specialist" and it is up to the "specialist" to review the case and
fix my account. They could not give me any time update nor could they explain
the situation.

So I'm still locked out of my money and in the dark as to why.

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bsvalley
Try to remove your bank account from your coinbase account, then re-attach
your bank account.

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lisbakke
The Coinbase team has manually disabled my account without explanation -- I'm
skeptical that removing / re-adding my bank account would re-enable my trading
and transferring between coinbase / coinbase pro. I'm also not sure that I'd
even be able to complete those actions given that things are disabled for me
right now.

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bsvalley
Are you able to login to your account? If so, go to Settings > Linked Account.
Remove your bank account, then add it again.

Had a similar problem, similar reaction to yours. I tried this and it fixed my
problem instantly after 2 months watching at the market crashing... I saw a
post on Reddit explaining that this trick was the only thing that worked.

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samueldavid
centralization is not always good, i hope you get your account back.

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lisbakke
Thanks!

