So it seems like several customers have had their orders canceled recently. I don't know how their system works in detail, but I am guessing with the recent jump in price they don't have enough BTC to cover the the jump without losing money?

This was on their blog:

"A Coinbase customer wrote in with a question today.  I figured other people may benefit from the response so with his permission I’ve decided to publish it along with our response.  Hope it helps!

Hey Coinbase,

          Just wondering what the deal was with the cancelled transaction. Your service is fantastic and I am a big supporter overall. It’s just I’ve been seeing a lot of complaints of people having their bitcoin purchases cancelled at the last minute. This is a huge problem with bitcoin because the price is so variable. With the 5 day wait period, locking the price in is important as you know and it’s really not fair to people to let them know at the last second they won’t be getting their bitcoin. That’s just a punch in the gut, and it is causing financial loss.

       I’ve made so much money buying bitcoins from you guys I’m going to have to declare it on my taxes for 2013. I’m not concerned about the $ amount so much as that it just doesn’t happen again. $20 bucks is a worthy price to pay to use your service.

I would just like to get some clarification as to why, all of a sudden, after thousands of dollars of purchases, my transaction was “high-risk.” An inconsequential 10 btc purchase. I think you need to better explain why people are having their transactions cancelled.

Best,
Concerned Customer


Dear Concerned Customer,

Sorry about that - after manually reviewing your account I’ve gone ahead and whitelisted it so you shouldn’t experience any more issues (I see you have started some additional purchases, these will go through as normal).

I agree with you on the high risk emails being frustrating.  And you’re absolutely correct that we haven’t done a good enough job explaining the reason behind them.

To give you some context, as one of the few bitcoin services offering payment via consumer friendly (reversible) payment methods we are essentially under attack 24/7 by hundreds of scammers around the world entering fake bank accounts etc trying to steal bitcoins.  We expected this when we launched the service, and are about 80% of the way through building a world class fraud prevention system.  Obviously this is a complex engineering challenge, something that took companies like Paypal several years to get a handle on.  We’ve already solved the majority of issues to make it a net-positive operation, but it will still require a lot more work going forward.  And the user experience has definitely suffered a bit in the mean time while we have waged this war.

A few points worth mentioning:

1. There is no human reviewing the transactions deciding they are high risk.  These are automated systems that make educated guesses looking for suspicious signals, and they only get 80-90% accuracy right now.  The good news is that the more transactions we do the smarter and more accurate these systems become over time.  But there is no human at Coinbase passing a value judgement.  The only time a human is involved is when we manually review an account after a mishap like in your case to whitelist or take some other action.

2. This of course only affects converting USD (or your local currency) into or out of bitcoin.  Bitcoin-to-bitcoin transactions don’t face these issues and are never canceled (as long as they are accepted by the rest of the bitcoin network).

3. A 10 BTC purchase may not sounds like much, but with high volumes small percentage changes can make a big difference.  So let’s say everyone is doing 10 BTC purchases, and in aggregate we’re doing about $3M a month in bitcoin sales.  If our fraud rate changes from 1% to 2% we’d lose an additional $30k that month.  As sales keep growing, small changes like this will only be magnified.


Anyway, building systems like this is what we’re good at and love working on so we’re definitely not complaining - but I just wanted to provide some context as you requested.

It’s also worth noting that we only buy the amount of coins we expect to pay out, adjusted for estimated fraud. For example, if we have 100 bitcoin of purchases and estimate 3 bitcoin are fraudulent, we only buy 97. Thus, we don’t profit from a canceled order. More broadly, a few dollars here and there from unrealized gains isn’t what’s important to us -
we want to build something long lasting that brings bitcoin to the masses.

Thank you for bearing with us as we continuing working on improving things.  Having an easy way for people to buy and sell bitcoin (via consumer friendly, reversible, payment methods) is an important part of the bitcoin ecosystem.  Our goal is to provide this link and do it better than anyone else.  We certainly don’t have everything working perfectly today, but we’re getting a little closer each day.

Thank you,
Brian Armstrong"

Just tweeted them, will see what they say. Thanks for the tip!

Very helpful! Thank you!

An after sending a couple emails to support I have heard nothing back.

Count me out! lol

Good work!

"On Feb 23, 2013 you purchased 10.00 BTC via bank transfer for $286.69.

Unfortunately, we have decided to cancel this order because it appears to be high risk. We do not send out any bitcoins on high risk transactions, and your bank account will not be charged.

Please understand that we do this to keep the community safe and avoid fraudulent transactions. Apologies if you are one of the good users who gets caught up in this preventitive measure - we don't get it right 100% of the time, but we need to be cautious when it comes to preventing fraud.

You may have more luck trying again in a few weeks. Best of luck and thank you for trying Coinbase."

I have made transactions with them before, I think this is BS and they just don't want to payout becouse of the price increase!

EDIT:
I received this from customer support at 12:09 AM PST on March 1st: "Hi,

Sorry about that! After manually reviewing your account I've whitelisted it so you shouldn't experience any additional issues going forward. I've also pushed through the transaction that was canceled previously (at the original exchange rate you locked in), so you should have those coins by the end of tomorrow. In addition, we recently wrote a blog post about this you might find interesting: http://blog.coinbase.com/post/44046687068/high-risk-transactions

Hope it helps and sorry again for the trouble!"

EDIT: After three days there is no evidence of a transaction occurring or about to occur in either my Coinbase account or my bank account. And no further response from Coinbase.

UPDATE:3/12/13
So the original funds I had in my spare checking account (wont let anyone have direct access to my primary) to purchase BTC I moved a week ago to buy BTC elsewhere. I also sent them an email 7 days ago asking them what was going on that and that there was no indication of transaction occurring in my coinbase account. Thinking it had been canceled as there was no response from their support or any indication of a transaction I only had a $240 balance in my account today. So guess what... blammo it was debited today with no warning, indication or email from Coinbase in the last two weeks. And hello $35 Wells Fargo overdraft fee... and no the bank wouldn't reverse it even after moving funds from another account an hour later. They said it was "pre-authorized" and they could not reverse it.

So moral of the story, Coinbase can, will and does debit transaction upwards of a month after the initial order with no warning or indication after they told you they cancelled your order and provided no proof of a reversal. Whats next? Double debits? Even right now there is no indication of a transaction in my Coinbase account. Still no BTC either.

UPDATE: I RECEIVED MY BTC! All is well, Coinbase was true to their word.!