Allegedly Coinbase prevented 1,000 customers From Sending Funds to the Hackers

[20kevin20]

I remember when I first got into bitcoin, Coinbase used to be my main wallet. They never prevented me from getting scammed by fake cloud mining services.

It's much harder to prove a service is a scam than proving a "giveaway" is. Besides that, cloud mining websites do not have a single address they use so it's way harder to detect whether it's an address owned by them unless they've reused it. Blocking a service from Coinbase would've possibly sparked outrage, especially if it proved to be legit (very few cloud mining sites are legit) after a while.

Pro tip: stay way from too-good-to-be-true offers/services.

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[Kelvinid]

Coinbase action now I must give appreciation to prevent and freeze suspicious transactions, especially related to sending funds
to the twitter hackers that recently occurred. The actions taken by Coinbase could save 1000 customers, this is something that
must be copied by other exchanges.

Will it hopes that could be serves as a mirror to the others and actually fairly do an immediate action to any suspicious looking transaction. Yeah, Coinbase save hundreds or thousands of Bitcoin transaction but the most important is they save ther reputation and trust from the community.

Traders and investors will look the capability of every exchanges and this happenings to Coinbase will likely to raise its level. Now, I understand why they become one of the best exchanges in crypto market and that surely because they ought to do something helpfull in all parties. I'm gald hearing this one.

[7788bitcoin]

Anybody who falls for that kind of scam is gonna have themselves to blame. period.
Anyone with a spark of common sense should realize that no one simply returns twice the amount of anything.

In German we have a proverb for this behaviour: "Greed eats brains" 

The only aspect that baffles me is that the scam is nothing new and still people fall for these kind of stupidity says a lot about the market, mostly everyone is here to make a quick buck and if they see some sort of doubling schemes they will not think twice because they have no idea about the market as they think it is possible to somehow multiply the coins and we have heard these kind of scams every year and still people will not learn.
If coinbase really prevented people from sending the coins to scammers it is great.

[Nellayar]

Crypto exchange Coinbase has said that it prevented little over 1,100 customers from sending bitcoin to Twitter hackers who hijacked high-profile accounts to advertise a bitcoin scam last week.

If Coinbase didn't take the step, these customers would have collectively sent 30.4 bitcoin (currently worth about $278,000) to hackers, the exchange's chief information security officer, Philip Martin, told Forbes. Notably, this amount is more than twice the actual amount ($121,000) that hackers collected via victims.

https://www.theblockcrypto.com/post/72200/coinbase-says-it-prevented-over-1000-customers-from-sending-280000-worth-of-bitcoin-to-twitter-hackers

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Excellent operational work. If all exchanges had taken such measures in time, the hackers would probably have received significantly less.
What do you think?

It just shows how cryptocurrency industry learned from the past hacking events. They already have an idea to trap users who have suspicious moved in their exchange. I am not a coinbase user but this is a good thing because they have excellent work in regards to the security. What matters most for me is that who are the people behind the twitter account hacking? I hope they will be found so that hacking will become more difficult and eradicated in crypto space.

[The Sceptical Chymist]

Do we need to give Coinbase a pat in the back here? They take measures to prevent "1,100" customers, supposedly,however, where are Coinbase support when you needed them? Specially the downtime pattern we've seen in the past from them, when the price of bitcoin suddenly spike?  .

Well, sometimes you can be deserving of some criticism while still receiving a pat on the back.  Coinbase is far from an ideal exchange, but at least they did something right here.  I'm not sure a lot of other crypto exchanges would have prevented any of their customers from getting scammed.

The only aspect that baffles me is that the scam is nothing new and still people fall for these kind of stupidity says a lot about the market, mostly everyone is here to make a quick buck<snip>

As long as greed exists, people are going to be falling for these scams.  Not everyone in the crypto space is out for a quick buck, but many will try to take advantage of an offer if they think it offers high rewards and low risk--it's just too bad the folks who got scammed weren't fully aware of what the risks actually were, but that's typical of any scam situation.

[desticy]

This is quite interesting that Coinbase actually does some good that is not based on something that benefits themselves.  That said, I would still not ever use Coinbase again.  They are a scummy/untrustworthy company that is all about what's best for themselves not the community.

This is not entirely true. The funds that the exchange did not allow to transfer at the wrong time belonged to the exchange technically.
So, in fact, CoinBase saved itself from additional losses, including from leaving customers in connection with this incident. Good job anyway.

[snipie]

Crypto exchange Coinbase has said that it prevented little over 1,100 customers from sending bitcoin to Twitter hackers who hijacked high-profile accounts to advertise a bitcoin scam last week.
-snip-

It is rare to read something positive about Coinbase these days but it seems that they did a good and fast work over there to prevent that mess. As mentioned already by other, this can be used too to prevent any transactions and will cause false negative issues to flagged addresses?!

[Oilacris]

This is quite interesting that Coinbase actually does some good that is not based on something that benefits themselves.  That said, I would still not ever use Coinbase again.  They are a scummy/untrustworthy company that is all about what's best for themselves not the community.

This is not entirely true. The funds that the exchange did not allow to transfer at the wrong time belonged to the exchange technically.
So, in fact, CoinBase saved itself from additional losses, including from leaving customers in connection with this incident. Good job anyway.

They have just done on what things should be done for their own good and of course people who do tend to make deposit will surely leave out coinbase platform but it cant be assured that they wont use it up after then get scammed but at least they are presuming things up that it might happen and thats actually a good move.

Reputation and User count is on the line and they do know that this is why making such decision like this will really preserve out the two and still able to stand strong into its spot as one of the most
famous platform as of these days.

Exchangers should really think up these kind of acts in times of potential scams.

[DooMAD]

I'm finding this topic quite depressing.  It's making me wonder whether human beings are, generally, ever going to be smart enough for any decentralised system to truly function as envisioned.  The very thought of "mass adoption" seems somewhat ludicrous now.  Given that, even at the decidedly niche present day adoption adoption levels, 1000 dipshits needed a third party service to babysit them.  And countless more actually managed to send money to the scammers in such an obvious ruse.  How many millions of people would it have been if in some alternate bizzarro-timeline we had already achieved mass adoption?  We could spend the next 50 years improving and refining code and it wouldn't change a thing, since the user is always going to be the weak link.

I get the sense it's always going to be a two-tier system.  Only intelligent and careful people will be capable of having the benefits of decentralisation.  Everyone else either gets a padded play area or robbed blind.  I don't see a great deal of hope for humanity, even in the long run.  People are actually getting dumber, somehow.  Like, a genuine evolution-in-reverse kinda deal.  Devolving back into pond scum or something.  It's nuts.

[DooMAD]

Of course, if all exchange had acted faster and initiated those measures in time the 14 customers wouldn't have succeeded in sending the bitcoins. Probably ten more customers would have been stopped from completing the transaction.

That's not something we want to be relying on, though.  We tell people about the importance of holding their own keys and not relying on exchanges and web-wallets, but so many of them clearly can't be trusted with that responsibility.  I don't see a way around it.  Blacklisting is something that will *never* be implemented at protocol level, yet we're applauding a centralised service for effectively doing that to prevent their eejit customers from giving money to scammers.

[NotFuzzyWarm]

Of course, if all exchange had acted faster and initiated those measures in time the 14 customers wouldn't have succeeded in sending the bitcoins. Probably ten more customers would have been stopped from completing the transaction.

That's not something we want to be relying on, though.  We tell people about the importance of holding their own keys and not relying on exchanges and web-wallets, but so many of them clearly can't be trusted with that responsibility.  I don't see a way around it.  Blacklisting is something that will *never* be implemented at protocol level, yet we're applauding a centralized service for effectively doing that to prevent their eejit customers from giving money to scammers.

Welcome to the Modern World where the Human part of the equation is being rubbed out from many facets of life. Apparently, Humans can no longer be relied upon to pay attention to what they are doing and when something happens they (or their survivors) then love to whine about it because "it's not their fault!" so, systems are being built to think for them.

What Coinbase is doing is no different than what auto makers are doing with their "safety" features like lane warning/guidance, back up cameras, vehicle next to you sensors etc. Then there is this: Because many (idiots) are killed/injured each around the world because they are walking while texting, decide to cross the road without a care or thought about anything and get hit by a vehicle, cities are installing crosswalk warning systems designed specifically get the twits attention.

Of course, that just furthers degrades incentives to pay attention in the 1st place...
Case in point, a quote from the linked article (emphasis mine)

We developed a cell phone app that warns pedestrians when they initiate unsafe crossings and tested  the app in our stateof-the-art pedestrian simulator. The project  expands  on our first  SAFER-SIM  grant that investigated permissive alerts (ones that indicate when it is safe to cross).  We found that texting pedestrians who were given permissive alerts  took safer gaps than those without these alerts. However, they also paid much less attention to the traffic, relying on the alert system to identify when it was safe to cross.

Safe bet the same applies to exchanges trying to automajikly prevent folks from send coin to scammers. Alfred E. Newman comes to mind with his "What? Me worry?" quip.

[noorammak]

Coinbase shares are great, but it's best to leave traders accountable for their actions. They should only advise the customer, they do not have the right to prohibit their customers from transferring money anywhere if their customers have made no mistake.

[Debonaire217]

It's a good precaution that they act too fast regarding the issue of hacking. Though it is the responsibility of the exchange to protect their users, we can see that their team is active and concern. If ever coinbase didn't do the same thing, we can still not blame coinbase because it is also a responsibility of the users to prevent themselves being a victim.

These hackers are so prevalent these days but the security of the exchanges is also increasing that is why they are trying to socially engineer people in order to hack and steal money.

[CarnagexD]

Coinbase shares are great, but it's best to leave traders accountable for their actions. They should only advise the customer, they do not have the right to prohibit their customers from transferring money anywhere if their customers have made no mistake.

Coinbase clearly manipulate their trader by doing that although they did it for good sake. They are like saying ' don't do shit coz we can see everything up here and we can block you from doing that', and it made me think that they can label any address as a fraud and if you transfer funds to it they can easily refrain you doing it which might be a conflict for some in the future. I can agree that they should leave enough accountability for their users.

[rexxarofmoknathal]

This is quite interesting that Coinbase actually does some good that is not based on something that benefits themselves.  That said, I would still not ever use Coinbase again.  They are a scummy/untrustworthy company that is all about what's best for themselves not the community.

This is not entirely true. The funds that the exchange did not allow to transfer at the wrong time belonged to the exchange technically.
So, in fact, CoinBase saved itself from additional losses, including from leaving customers in connection with this incident. Good job anyway.

Indeed, the action just happened to benefit the rest of the customers not that that was a priority. In any case, the fact that thousands of people got saved by this is amazing but this should also be taken as a lesson that it doesn't matter where your money is - just assume there's always that slim chance of losing them. That's the risk everyone is taking when leaving their money exchanges and not cold wallets.

[DatKing]

Crypto exchange Coinbase has said that it prevented little over 1,100 customers from sending bitcoin to Twitter hackers who hijacked high-profile accounts to advertise a bitcoin scam last week.

If Coinbase didn't take the step, these customers would have collectively sent 30.4 bitcoin (currently worth about $278,000) to hackers, the exchange's chief information security officer, Philip Martin, told Forbes. Notably, this amount is more than twice the actual amount ($121,000) that hackers collected via victims.

https://www.theblockcrypto.com/post/72200/coinbase-says-it-prevented-over-1000-customers-from-sending-280000-worth-of-bitcoin-to-twitter-hackers

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Excellent operational work. If all exchanges had taken such measures in time, the hackers would probably have received significantly less.
What do you think?

A really nice work from Coinbase. It is very important for exchanges to give the most importance to security of their customers. This can attract many people's attention to Coinbase for doing such a nice job.

[Mr.sprin]

security is important and major customers will feel comfortable with tight security,
customer interest is likely to increase with security guarantees.

[DeathAngel]

Impressive prevention tactics by Brian Armstrong & co at Coinbase there. It was kinda simple to just block outgoing transactions to the addresses tweeted by the hacker but other exchanges didn’t do it. Kudos to Coinbase, say what you want about them but this shows how impressive & trustworthy they are.

[Dewi89]

Impressive prevention tactics by Brian Armstrong & co at Coinbase there. It was kinda simple to just block outgoing transactions to the addresses tweeted by the hacker but other exchanges didn’t do it. Kudos to Coinbase, say what you want about them but this shows how impressive & trustworthy they are.

I really appreciate Coinbase performance as no other exchange prohibits transactions to the hacker's Twitter account tweet address, I suggest all exchanges should follow Coinbase excellent footsteps to protect their customer funds.

[Emitdama]

That’s one of the advantages of having a centralized exchange, if these people that were stopped by Coinbase from sending money to the hackers were making use of wallets like Mycelium or Exodus where the creators of the wallet has no control over your wallet, they all would have sent this huge amount of money from their wallets to these hackers. Coinbase did a really good job in protecting their customers and that shows how much they can be trusted.

Moreover apart from that I think it’s really time that people wise up and stop acting, these things sounds too good to be true. People should try to understand the tactics that are being used by these scammers and start avoiding them.