Dear Kraken,
How you guys were ever recommended as the top North American crypto exchange is beyond me. I've been trying to make a USD withdrawal since mid-December. Six (that's 6) failures. Somehow even after the trading engine "upgrade" your withdrawal page can offer zero information about the failure other than one word - Failed. How in this century can you manage to program a website that offers zero information as to what the cause of the failure is? Now we get into the black hole of "enter a support request, escalate it using this form and wait".
Twice now from my support calls I've been told - "
our transfer partner's OCR software can't recognize your government issued ID. Please take another" - ok fine, no problems there. Photo's are easy to take. However the kicker is this phrase -
"
Please note that we are unable to provide any time frame on when we can have USD funding activated on your account. This is due to a huge backlog of manual review cases that need approval"
Good Lord! How can you not know a time frame? And how will I as a customer know when it's ready? Should I just keep submitting withdrawals and wait for the one magical day when I get a green "Success" message? Please note that I'm just guessing that's how it'll look because I've
never seen a successful one. At this point I believe those "Success" messages are like Unicorns and only exist in fantasy books.
Let me offer some suggestions as to how you might fix some of these problems:
- Find another funding/wire transfer partner - obviously the one you have can't manage to process anything so why not?
- Find another partner with some better OCR software - if Alexa can order me a pizza and tell me who won the World Series in 1953, a dumb piece of software ought to be able to pick out my name and address from a picture
- Hire some temps to process said manual backlog - this is a no brainer. AWS Mechanical Turk. Temps R Us, millions of options here
- Offer an alternate means of fiat withdrawal - Oh the horror! A real check, on real paper in a real envelope with a stamp. I guess you can't be crypto cool and still send checks to people. Ever heard of PayPal or Zelle?
- Pre-process check government issued id's - imagine how many fewer support calls you'd get if you actually pre-processed the documents you get for correctness
Sorry for the rant. We as a community know you're experiencing unprecedented demand. We know you're covered up with support requests. We know that you get XX thousand new user sign ups a day. But if you can't manage to accomplish something as simple as a wire transfer for inbound or outbound funding then I would expect that soon there will be no more requests for funding or withdrawal.
Patiently waiting for a Unicorn or a successful withdrawal, whichever comes first.