Trying to divert the topic.
The OP was clearly complaining about the practice itself.
I do not care if CoinBase is aggressive towards flagging transactions as fraudulent and cancels the transaction and/or returns funds in reasonable time.
You and every other white knight of CoinBase so conveniently skip over why it takes automated software 1 week to determine a transaction is fraudulent or why accounts that are flagged as "high risk" are even allowed to place transactions without additional verification. This would in fact go very much against the grain of KYC/AML. If they were to allow this and not give customers their instant gratification of purchase after instant linking bank accounts, they know it would shrink the growth of their customer base. So... they chose not to. This doesn't seem to be acting in good faith of KYC/AML does it?
There is a serious issue that CoinBase accepts transaction from accounts they flagged and then holds funds for one week or longer before notifying customer and the refusal to even attempt to work out transactions with the customer.
They are doing one of the following:
- Decided your account is high risk and accepted the transaction only to cancel 1 week later. Again holding your funds for 1 week + without the intention to even sell.
- Decided right off the bat that a transaction is high risk and NOT obtain any BTC from exchange for resell. Again, they hold your funds for 1 week + without intention to sell.
- Decided later on in the transaction AFTER the BTC was already obtained to flag the transaction as high risk. Absolutely no reason in this case as to why they cannot settle on the original transaction rate with the customer. This one in particular reeks of fractional lending for themselves against their own TOS.
- Could not obtain BTC off exchange at agreed upon rate + premium and hold your funds for 1 week +. In this case, "You will obtain your BTC by..." is patently false.
None of what I stated above, has anything to do with CoinBase' action in good faith to comply with KYC/AML/BSA legistlation. NONE whatsoever.
In fact, if they were truly attempting to comply with KYC/AML/BSA, they would not even be accepting transactions on flagged accounts. But they obviously are not.
You're misinterpreting my point. I'll re-iterate:
Coinbase is not "scamming" for profit. Their observance of AML/KYC regs has resulted in the OP losing out on a profit, yes....but that's very different than Coinbase deliberately holding capital to profit from market dynamics. You guys are always accusing bitcoin companies of that; yet it's absurd. If a US-based company was doing that deliberately, they wouldn't last very long at all, for two reasons: 1) It's an idiotic business practice since it adds lots of risk but little profit to the bottom line (since you could only do it to the occasional customer without it being patently obvious), and 2) They'd come under fatal regulatory attack rapidly. The regulators would have an easy time prosecuting such practices (and would love to take the opportunity to trumpet "we're protecting the consumer!"). Bitcoin companies operating in the white-market are doing everything they can to avoid regulatory hassles. Sure, some may be incompetent, but again, that's a very meaningfully different issue than the company being malicious.
And to re-iterate, the ultimate source of these is issues is the attempt (successful or not) to comply with a very fuzzy and complicated set of federal and state-by-state AML/KYC regs.
Now please grow-up, make some attempt to understand the operational issues of these companies, and spare me your conspiracy theories.
