Consumer complaint received 2022-05-05
Product: Credit card or prepaid card — General-purpose prepaid card
Issue: Problem with a purchase or transfer — Card company isn't resolving a dispute about a purchase or transfer
Company: Coinbase, Inc. (CA)

This is in relation to the The Coinbase Card issued by XXXX, XXXXXXXX XXXX XXXX, persuant to a license from XXXX XXXX XXXX & powered by XXXX. 

At the time of this submission, I have 3 transactions from 2 different vendors that have been " pending '' since XX/XX/XXXX which is over 40 days ago, and also two from XX/XX/XXXX & XX/XX/XXXX which are now nearly 30 days as pending. I have contacted Coinbase 's Customer Support for their card to ask why these aren't posted transactions and initially they made excuses saying it would be because of the merchant and I would have to contact them to clear it on their end. 4 of these 5 particular transactions are from XXXX, who I contacted about this and they told me these transactions have already been voided or posted on their end within a couple days, and that it is definitely on my banks end if they're still pending, which I already knew was the case because I have many more XXXX transactions that have occured after these ones that went from pending to posted within 24 hours of making them, and I wouldn't even have been allowed to request more rides if I had previously unsettled payments due to them still. I relayed XXXX  response to Coinbase Support and I would receive emails from their " Specialists '' which mostly have been genetic template responses that didn't even have anything to do with the issue I am complaining about, which is simply for them to update the transactions so that either I am returned to me my money that was placed on a hold, or that I received my cash rewards back for the purchases. The lack of relevance a lot of these emails have shown makes me believe I am not even dealing with human customer service and simply being responded to by XXXX. Customer Service Agent software pretending to be people. I find it odd that their Card Customer Service can be contacted by phone, which everyone their has a distinctly XXXX accent so I assume might be based at foreign call center these jobs have been outsourced to ... and they can't do much besides escalate these issues to their " Case Management Teams and Specialists '' and when you ask to talk to them directly you're told they have no phone number and can only be contacted by email, and to wait until they email me, which when they do is often not even relevant to the issue. 

This was a similar issue I had with them a handful of times last year when I would stay at hotels and the hotels placed a deposit hold on the coinbase card and when I checked out, they would release the hold within 1 to 2 days, but every single time which was at least 5 or 6 times, coinbase would keep the transaction as pending for 30 days without fail, longer if I didn't keep calling to bug them about it, before returning my money and always blaming the merchant hotels despite the hotels confirming otherwise if I had called before the XXXX day. 

The only logical conclusion I can come to for why this keeps happening is because perhaps they want to take advantage of a situation and keep customer funds for their own liquidity to make money and interest off of when their customers should and could be doing it if they wanted to as soon as the merchant releases the funds. And while something like {$100.00} being held for 30 days doesn't sound like it would be worth it for a publicly traded company to bother with to make a little interest, if you multiplied {$100.00} a month by the XXXX or so verified users they have, they can certainly make a lot of money by holding the money of customers for excessive lengths despite merchants already releasing funds back. 

I have contacted then multiple times over the last week about this, and everyone I talk to gives me some kind of run around and says they can't do anything from where they sit and inevitably pawn my issue off to the " specialists '' who send irrelevant emails and then respond with excuses saying they are working on the issue, which is all very convenient when the longer it takes the more they can benefit from holding that liquidity. It is XX/XX/XXXX right now.. there should be no excuses or no issue requiring weeks and teams and specialists to resolve.. updating a transaction from pending to posted is typically done by the next day..not the next month or month and a half.