But I've always wondered why people think this is how investment vehicles work. I monkeyed around with stock market bets and even Robin Hood allows you to cash out of your positions.
Coinbase supported direct bank withdrawals well before they launched their crypto debit cards.
Are you sure you didn't fall for a scam version?
> and will not pay the $20 million ransom demand we received. Instead we are establishing a $20 million reward fund for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the criminals responsible
That, and they're reimbursing customers who were tricked.
The bottom line is Coinbase didn't adequately secure sensitive customer information, and it was leaked.
Not, "Gosh, 'overseas' people, what can ya do?"
Bank tellers can take thousands out of the vault at any time and yet it seems it’s not a very big issue.
Vannia Chatt: https://6abc.com/post/former-citizens-bank-teller-accused-st...
Karen Farrell Tigler: https://www.irs.gov/compliance/criminal-investigation/former...
Stephanie Rose Kilbert: https://people.com/bank-teller-stole-money-while-pretending-...
Derek Aut: https://www.justice.gov/usao-ma/pr/former-bank-teller-arrest... https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/03/28/boston...
Mountee Brown: https://www.justice.gov/usao-md/pr/maryland-bank-teller-plea...
Being US citizens doesn't make people incorruptible. In fact, many other countries are less corrupt than the US. Someone in this very thread reports having witnessed bank tellers getting bribed in one of those countries: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43996765
I've been through a background check designed to screen out people who were vulnerable to bribery. They interviewed my friends and family from the previous several years to find out if I was secretly gay, cheated on my wife, gambled, drank too much, used illegal drugs, or had money problems for some other reason. It took about a year. I think it would be hard for a financial institution to be economically competitive doing that kind of thing with their call-center workers, because their customers can't tell if they're secure or not, just how much their services cost.
With a lot of this online stuff, no matter who gets your password or access to your account it’s you who has to take care of it. Whereas if the bank teller steals from the till it’s not your problem.
But what about the capital class? How will they afford more yachts? So sad. They're.. um... job creators or something. Anyway, that's what Fox News told me.
For example at many banks the teller might need to get manager approval for some cash withdrawals, even for seemingly smaller amounts of money. Despite what it may seem, it's not because of some distrust towards the client but a safeguard against internal fraud.
https://www.americanbanker.com/news/call-centers-and-bank-br... "Call centers and bank branches are major fraud liabilities"
https://www.bai.org/banking-strategies/beating-crooks-at-cal... "Aite Group’s findings that 61 percent of fraud can be traced back to the [call] center are equally concerning, as is its prediction that contact center fraud loss will double by 2020."
> ...bribed AT&T employees at a call center in Bothell, Washington, to "use their network credentials and exceed their authorized access to AT&T's computers to submit large numbers of fraudulent and unauthorized unlock requests on behalf of the conspiracy and to install malware and unauthorized hardware on AT&T's systems," according to the indictment.
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/att-employees-bribed-1m-unlo...
> ..install malware and unauthorized hardware on AT&T's systems
That's not as harmless as unlocking phones early. A major carrier that has access to texts, geolocations, and call logs being hacked like that is extremely concerning.
alternatively limit the roles and what the offshore people are able to do, but then any escalation means domestic people, which brings us back to "well at that point just use AI to automate easy tasks"
Small set of privileged employees who work from the home office and are compensated to match. If an issue requires their attention, it takes time to resolve. But it's resolved securely. In essence, what Google does.
Alternative is the banking model. Low-cost customer service massively empowered and just eat the costs of breaches as they come.
My multiple banks’ customer service is meh but they do resolve problems and as far as I can tell, haven’t leaked any of my stuff yet in decades. That you think “what Google does” is better than “the banking model” is amusing.
>Go on LinkedIn
>Look up profiles of people who work at Coinbase
>Contact and bribe them with a burner account
Plenty of exchanges don't know their customers, and in fact that is how they get their customers.
This is overlooked most places but if you examine around the time the FATF finally pretty much eliminated bearer bonds, bearer stocks, and large bank notes was exactly the time crypto really took off.
You can receive crypto privately to your own wallet without sharing PII, without any exchange.
Without the right details the customer support people don’t get entry into the customers account details.
Banks have been doing this for 30+ years..
“Give a man a gun and he can rob a bank, but give a man a bank, and he can rob the world.”
That there are more options than holding your hands up and arguing the company couldn't have done anything further in terms of implementing effective controls.
The fact that they keep blaming overseas customer support is pure blame shifting - you still hired someone and gave them access to all this data, Coinbase!
This is a precedent to Coinbase employees getting physical threats at their door just because e.g. some voter registration, utility company, bank, credit card, or court record decided to release their name and addresses on the internet. People could show up at some Coinbase software engineers' apartment doors with guns demanding they send BTC to arbitrary addresses.
Plus numerous ways to infer your address from other data sources, including apps that grab GPS on friends' cellphones when they visit, etc.
Finally, shutting down paid data brokers seems virtually impossible in practice, which means anybody googling you can pay $20 and get everything.
Remember, the issue isn't lazy goodguys but even slightly motivated badguys, who then use third party scripts to do the data collection.
Just jail them. Make it a felony to release someone's PII without their written consent, and make data brokers illegal to begin with.
> numerous ways to infer your address from other data sources, including apps that grab GPS on friends' cellphones when they visit
These are not the main vector of transmission of personal information. Yes, Meta could probably do some graph analysis and infer this, but it's a lot of work, and their data leaks are rare in comparison to all the other companies, financial institutions, and governmental organizations, that freely post residential addresses on the internet and to data brokers for the world to Google.
> companies, organizations and governments that collect it for various reasons
KYC requiring addresses should be banned. Companies should not collect a residential address.
I bought a house here after a long time out of country and the first year all I got for mail was scam bullshit. Loads of it.
If you sling code for cryptocurrency you and your loved ones are "in the game" now.
Practically every company has someone with credentials who is in some combination of debt, a damningly-adulterous relationship, a damningly-illegal substance relationship and/or feels underappreciated or slighted compensationwise. The question is generally how much it costs.
They would have been better off not even bringing up their location if they weren't going to be transparent.
That’s very load-bearing. It won’t help.
The CS reps are based in a LCOL country so the opportunity for theft is simply incredibly lucrative.
What is really needed, is customer-in-the-loop for access to their data. The problem is, not all accesses would make sense. Doing analytics over the data of the top 1% of customers, for example, requires some level of access, but would freak out those customers if they had to approve it.
What about, for example, a higher-tier support person performing QA over someone else’s work? What about DFIR teams doing research on potential abuse? Etc etc.
It's hard to not believe in Karma sometimes.
>On April 12, Coinbase updated their user agreement to take effect TODAY, May 15, with new language about waiving some rights to class action lawsuits and jurisdiction selection.
https://bsky.app/profile/jsweetli.bsky.social/post/3lp7sw647...
Also, "Coinbase had detected the breach independently in previous months", aren't they required to disclose this? In the EU they are: Every EU institution must do this within 72 hours of becoming aware of the breach, where feasible
And what that means is that
1) If you lose access to your account (through either your own fault, or coinbases fault) that the process of recovering it may not be so straightforward anymore.
2) Hackers can try to “recover” accounts now using this leaked info.
This is a huge problem. What coinbase needs are IRL offices where you can go and do things like account recovery, and where people trying to steal money can be caught and prosecuted (and makes a huge barrier for the overseas thieves who are usually doing this)
The only solution here is: hardware 2 factor like yubikeys.
That's just a bank.
It may not be a crypto-as-a-theoretically/ideologically-pure-construct problem, but it absolutely is a crypto-as-a-real-world-asset problem.
I don't think anyone claimed that crypto was un-losable or un-stealable. It's not magic.
Come on, if you’re going to copy someone else’s snark, pick a good one.
Gets you the equivalent of mugged by people on the other side of the planet?
At least with cash, it's a one-on-one involuntary transaction.
Cryptocurrencies are classified, for now, as securities.
Currency is currency and cryptocurrency is not. So please do not attempt to compare apples to oranges here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_(finance)
If you wish to compare cryptosecurities to other securities, then do that, but don't try to act like it is some sort of future utopian currency.
So if we want to constrain impact of such attacks, we must make companies keep less data and delete them faster. For example, instead of storing a photo of ID, store just a checkbox that the person showed their ID and it was valid.
This applies not only to cryptocurrency, but to any company like Google, Uber, Amazon etc - if they didn't keep extra data, there would be little value in the leaks.
So the blame is not at cryptocurrency, but on companies not wishing to delete the data and governments demanding them to collect the data not necessary for operation. It's the government and capitalists who create problems out of nowhere.
Doesn't work at scale. You get bribes, rogue employees, socially engineered employees. In the US, look up the articles about phone/SIM unlocks and SIM card copies. Russia has a problem with e-signatures, that most people have no idea about. It's possible to sell somebody's real estate with one of these. Loans granted just based on passport data. Neither politics nor media highlight these issues. Overall in this case your suggestion tries to handle the symptoms of the KYC requirement.
Here's a more extreme treatment: let people change their full legal name at will. Gender's already kinda possible.
More KYC creates more problems while solving some others. Why didn't the same society despite KYC/AML tackle the problem pointed at in a previous comment? "Florida teens kidnap Las Vegas man, drive him to Arizona desert, steal $4M in cryptocurrency"[1] Why is there this crime?
Without mandatory KYC laws, this particular attack would be near pointless. No name tied to account, bookkeeping doesn't archive wire transaction details for the past 10 years.
Let businesses easily accept cryptocurrency (like... regular cash?), without a blade to their throat held by the government, and the need for such centralization points will greatly diminish. People get in trouble by p2p-exchanging money with unknown peers; in some instances this "trouble" has the unit of "years".
It's in nobodies' interest to protect cryptocurrency payments as the alternative, other than the activists, and the big groups jumping in on it for the speculation purposes - something they had refined decades ago. There's CBDC is on the horizon.
Every single crypto property I’ve talked to has ended up at a point where they believes that someone cheated them outside the bounds of the system and then look to authority figures to rectify the situation, like the government.
If you are someone who actually believes that crypto transactions should be unmodifiable by any third party then what you said makes sense. I just don’t think that anyone telling me they believe that isn’t lying to themselves at best, and lying to everyone else at worst
What you've described is the same thing that many Crypto enthusiasts call a "Bank"
I guess I can walk downtown to CB HQ, but something tells me I won't get past the front desk.
and that's where hats fail in all metrics to cryptocurrency and how cryptocurrency satisfies my criteria for money
One that I'm using does, but I find it extremely annoying when they have me go to a branch to unblock my account that they locked due to a poorly calibrated risk system (that they need due to not supporting actually secure 2FA methods).
Is this satire?
And when that’s lost, what do you do? Aren’t you back to account recovery step?
People getting locked out of their account (which can happen due to no fault of the user, e.g. by an overly nervous risk system) will be really happy to have to potentially travel to a different city to regain account access...
Fine, make it optional. I actually would love a version of cold storage that is: never release this money unless I personally travel to an office if NYC and authorize it.
Got to make it so employees can’t do anything nefarious. This helps protect them.
But they can look the other way about flaws in their Electron client.
Really, can you possibly tell if your Signal messages were compromised? Now that iPhones aren't really jailbreakable, you can't even see inside your own device.
Under specific conditions, the client can communicate with malware already on device, save data locally for other software to pick up, or downright stream the decrypted software to a third party.
Most likely is to introduce a flaw in the client that can be used by other walware on the client.
Clearly no red team members on HN these days.
Historically, although KYC regulations were widespread in Communist countries, they were unthinkable in most democratic countries until 9/11, which provided spy agencies with their golden chance to write their wishlist into law. But unfortunately that helps foreign spy agencies just as much as, maybe more than, it helps domestic ones.
In https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_your_customer#Laws_by_cou... you can see when they were introduced in different countries.
Yeah I know eventually these will be linked by some data broker and will meld into the same thing.
But I compare it to using a fingerprint to unlock a password manager on your phone. That ain't KYC.
It's been a bad day.
https://www.coinbase.com/en-de/blog/protecting-our-customers...
What they got
- Name, address, phone, and email
- Masked Social Security (last 4 digits only)
- Masked bank‑account numbers and some bank account identifiers
- Government‑ID images (e.g., driver’s license, passport)
- Account data (balance snapshots and transaction history)
The world needs to stop pretending that SSNs are secret. They aren't.
I don't think that this is still legal under the GDPR.
For a site such as this the odds aren't in their favor anymore.
They could have designed KYC to minimize long-term storage requirements etc at some cost to what they could enforce, but a government like the US is inherently sloppy with the rights that are reserved for parties besides itself.
At the end of the day it'd be hard for me to continue holding that because, on the balance, we expect companies to keep data private and to not enable illegal activity, not gov't to avoid asking companies to do things, lest they screw up.
Real cop out here, be honest. Why should every single agent have access to your identity documentation (which is only required for KYC) in perpetuity?
Using a hardware/"cold-ish" wallet does not protect you from scam calls: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/physical-addr...
Yes and their timeline doesn't add up with what they disclosed. If you take the Coinbase narrative, they only believed this was a 'material' issue once contacted by the hackers for a $20m demand, they weren't able to put the pieces together themselves.
The phishing has been elevated for weeks, especially via text message, and their lack of internal controls for access and monitoring are clearly severely lacking.
https://www.coinbase.com/blog/protecting-our-customers-stand...
> We will reimburse customers who were tricked into sending funds to the attacker due to social engineering attacks. If your data was accessed, you have already received an email from no-reply@info.coinbase.com; all notifications went out at 7:20 a.m. ET on 5/15 to affected customers.
It's fine to send a notification instructing them to visit the secure portal for more info, though. Hence, no-reply.
To contact the company you should go to company website at the address you know (which shouldn't be given in email as well), log in and send a message through internal message system, possibly referring to the email that you recieved through a random code (those can be auto-suggested if they recently tried to contact you by email).
If you do anything else your communication knwowingly mimics communication of a scammer.
Unrequested email should always only be one way communication. Email is too untrustworthy for it to be anything more.
It’s fascinating that we keep creating new technology and then find out that in practice most of it cannot be trusted. Which means it cannot be used for anything serious.
IT revolution is a bit of a failure
Some of these technologies that have been mass adopted because they're easily accessible also have glaring security holes and ways to be exploited built into them. It's a tale as old as time, and I can hardly blame businesses in this specific case (using no-reply addresses.)
I'm curious why no Coinbase Prime accounts were part of the leak (assuming that's what they mean). Is there some sort of additional layer of data protection behind the Coinbase Prime paywall? Or perhaps those accounts were intentionally avoided as they would presumably belong to more savvy users.
How many people are going to anonymously attack themselves now, just to get a reimbursement!
I see "We wanted to let you know that we detected activity suggesting that information related to your account may have been accessed in a way that did not align with our internal policies." in the email i got this morning
Correspondingly I'd assume either a) paying the ransom doesn't take it off the market or b) the info they stole isn't that interesting.
Unclear if users whose data was stolen, but did NOT transact in the last month are included in this statistic. Feels like a very intentional phrasing on their part
https://www.coinbase.com/en-gb/blog/protecting-our-customers...
I guess they didn't have as much luck as they wanted scamming Coinbase's customers, and once they had their fun they decided to try extorting Coinbase themselves.
The calls they flag as potential spam and telemarketers has been 100% accurate in my experience so i wish I could just silence those
It’s much better to just silence every spam call manually instead of having to go into voicemail, listen , decide if I need to respond, hope that I’m acting quickly enough that the other person answers when I ring them back, etc. i imagine this works for a lot of people. But if you get enough calls, or get urgent calls for any reason, it’s not ideal.
For those that can’t imagine the use cases. Consider you are primary contact for your elderly parent. If they fall in the middle of the night you might be getting a call from any random number. Do not disturb isn’t an option and sometimes the EMS guys will call you from their personal cell phone. Even some services like home security will call from random numbers. If ask a plumber to come over, some random technician will call from their device to talk. If a potential client gets my number somehow, I’d prefer to answer versus them get my voicemail.
You have to also factor in that a lot of people don’t even like leaving voicemail so they don’t leave one and I’m left guessing if it mattered that
It’s sad because this seems like such a low hanging fruit for a big improvement. At some point in the relatively recent past, they added the indicator of the caller being a spammer or telemarketer. Seems like that would have been a good time to also enhance this filter but it seems nobody ever connected the dots on that one. Or if I’m being even more cynical, some engineer actually decided he’d rather everyone see his work on every incoming spam call instead of his work quietly improving everyone’s experience
Therefore, an unknown number that can be blocked/ignored by your phone or the app is one that doesn't support Caller ID's name or number functions. It doesn't have anything to do with who's in your Contacts app, because of course those consist of known names and known numbers.
Google's call screening feature picks up the phone before it rings and asks the caller why they're calling. If they actually give a good reason, then it shows you the reason as text and you can decide whether to hang up on them or answer. https://support.google.com/phoneapp/answer/9118387
The calls are coming from new numbers, across multiple area codes. A few months ago I would have advised using Begone (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/begone-spam-call-blocker/id159...) to block but that only worked since these calls were isolated to blocks of area codes that were pretty safe to block like 888-XXX-XXXX, but now ZERO of these calls are using a fixed area code that would be relative safe to block.
I was looking through some phishing e-mails the other day out of curiosity and found a weird unicode character mistranslated. Immediately knew it was an artifact of bad translation. So they're not perfect, but they're damn good.
Because people who read the message and think it's professionally written despite the spelling errors have a large overlap with people who will fall for the scam, at least far enough that money is transferred.
Same with my Microsoft account actually
I usually just ignore it but I assume someone is testing if my email can be used to login.
Coinbase not only leaked your full name and address, they also gave up your balances, your transaction history, and images of your government identification.
People with "significant" crypto balances are being assaulted on the street and in their own homes, and family members are being kidnapped for ransom.
"Significant" in this case can be $10k or less.
Until now, your best defense secrecy. Never talk about crypto in public in any way that could be traced to your real-world identity.
Thanks to Coinbase that defense is now gone.
The bad guys can see who has ever had a significant balance on Coinbase (even if they don't right now), whether that balance was sold for cash and how much, or if you've ever transferred tokens off the exchange to a self-custody wallet.
Now the bad guys know who's worth kidnapping for ransom and where you live. For most people, a Google search of your name and home address turns up the names of family members who would would also be lucrative targets for kidnapping and threats of violence.
Coinbase will never be forced to reimburse all the damage they've done because the true cost would bankrupt the company.
I wonder why, select a person completely at random and by median you'll get just as much from what they have sitting in their checking account. Select a nicer area for an order of magnitude more. That's not encouragement to go assault people in their homes or kidnap families... just confusion.
Crypto? It's wild, and people think it's wild.
The distinguishing parts are things you don't want: easily corrupted, grifted, cheated and otherwise duped.
That's true, finding someone with 10k is not as easy as picking a person at random, but it is as easy as driving to the right parking lot and picking a person at random.
With crypto, no bank or other middleman involved, it's like stealing physical cash/gold/diamonds from someone, if you know they have it in their possession, so violence can be a lot more successful at coercing a change of possession.
Also, people do point guns in people’s faces and force them to pay them via Venmo or Cashapp. Google ‘Venmo robbery’ or ‘cashapp robbery’ for plenty of examples. Pointing a gun in someone’s face for $4M in crypto is a lot more lucrative.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/florida-teens-kidnap-las-vegas-20...
This story keeps repeating. Maybe we should try it and see if it works as a deterrent.
Sounds like an appendix.
This is due to US Government KYC laws that forced Coinbase to associate government identification with all accounts. No crypto company required ID until they were forced to.
Coinbase is the entity that set up this dangerous system.
Coinbase did it because it was cheap for them, not because they were being trustworthy custodians of information that put their customers at risk.
Sure, yes, obviously every company's employees and contractors are vulnerable to bribes and blackmail. That's why a trustworthy, competent custodian would establish systems and controls to prevent bribed and blackmailed insiders from mass-exfiltrating information that could get their customers killed.
The fact that other companies manage to be trustworthy, competent custodians while Coinbase doesn't is not the fault of KYC.
Essentially you cannot trust Coinbase IMO, might move the few hundred dollars of BTC out of there :-)
This is the crypto industry, who make the discrepancy between Theranos' claims and practice look conservative.
Someone, someone at that company should be going to prison for negligence
.. and are former employees of Coinbase .. oh! just imagining!!
And how long has this been at an increased level? Because i'm not buying the coinbase narrative that they thought this was a systemic issue until they were contacted by the 'cybercriminals'.
Why not just say what country the are from and how they hired them to start with. It's presented as those sneaky "overseas" people that somehow got access to our systems. This company makes what, a few billions in revenue but they couldn't vet and hire the right people?
I’m not usually a huge fan of crypto folks, but I applaud this.
I hope they are serious about paying the reward, and aren’t planning to rug-pull it.
They could always pay it in crypto.
It would also make many Ponzi schemes easier to spot, as they wouldn’t want to contribute.
It would be so simple to have access tracking and flag or lock out rogue employees... I look forward to seeing what the golden parachutes look like.
It won't work for 100% of all calls (what if the customer is locked out themselves etc.), but those calls can then be handled by even more closely monitored agents.
"Less than 1% of monthly transacting customers" means up to 1% were accessed – that seems very high, i.e. much higher than the number of customer service contacts I'd expect.
https://www.coinbase.com/blog/protecting-our-customers-stand...
That's not how front line support agent access should work. You get access based on active cases you are working on, not the keys to the kingdom because you might need to support a member at some future point in time.
If they were Coinbase employees or contractors, that means the company basically sold its own data to hackers, who then turned around and demanded a ransom.
Reimbursing duped customers makes sense, as it seems like they would have a pretty straightforward case to make in court that Coinbase's actions led to their loss.
I'm more curious if someone who feels the need to move, change banks, change their email, hire a security detail etc. could successfully sue the company to recover some or all of those costs.
This seems like a strange interpretation. If an employee at your company, against policy and likely illegally extracts proprietary data and gives it to hackers in exchange for money you can hardly say that "My company sold it's data".
I once applied for a bank position, and they wanted to run a credit check. If you're in a position of handling money, the company has a responsibility to vet its employees. Do I agree with credit checks? Absolutely not, but the point is, Coinbase is partially responsible and that's why they're refunding duped customers.
How far that responsibility goes is up for debate.
They in turn could go after the perpetrator. If they're using contractors who are cheap, unvetted, untrustworthy or don't carry liability insurance that's their problem and shouldn't excuse them of accountability.
When an employee ships a new feature, do you say "My company shipped a new feature?"
Update to the Coinbase User Agreement
We are emailing you about an important upcoming update to the Coinbase User Agreement. This update will revise our Arbitration Agreement with you. We made these updates to streamline the process for resolving disputes.
You can read the entire agreement here. The revised terms are in sections 9.9, 9.10 and Appendix 6.
These terms apply only to disputes that you or we initiate after May 15, 2025. The current terms will continue to apply until May 15.
---
What date did this news come out? I see it just happens to be the same date as mentioned in this email, May 15. Coinbase sneakily is trying to prevent their customers from exercising their legal rights. If you work for Coinbase, you ought to be ashamed and quit. If you use Coinbase, remove all your assets immediately.
I'm open to hearing reasons why this is just a coincidence or I'm misinterpreting the situation. Please, go ahead.
Corruption in these countries is extremely common. We're used to having a government that actually works in western countries. In these cheaper countries, bribes are routine and almost unavoidable.
Given the culture of corruption and how little the support agents are paid, it was only a matter of time before some bad actor tried to bribe them. Medical bills are expensive and need to be paid, making the agents highly vulnerable to this type of attack.
For many, the choice would be to accept the bribe, or let their sick child suffer from a treatable condition.
mooreds•14h ago
From https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/15/coinbase-says-customers-pe...
> The company said the hacker stole customer names, postal and email addresses, phone numbers, and the last four-digits of users’ Social Security numbers. The hacker also took masked bank account numbers and some banking identifiers, as well as customers’ government-issued identity documents, such as driver’s licenses and passports. The stolen data also includes account balance data and transaction histories.