Topic: Coinbase stole $3965.55 from me (Update: Resolved) (Read 1975 times)

Sounds like a case of troll...

Sounds like a case of jealousy on your part that as long as it only negatively affects people who are better off than you, you don't consider it important that people stick to their agreements.

Its great news you have solved this issue with Coinbase now do one thing and lock this thread its better for you 

This is great news to hear. Thank you for updating us. I'm glad that you got what was rightfully yours and I'm glad that Coinbase did the stand-up thing!

You should change your thread's title to reflect this update. Once again, thanks for informing the community about this and providing us updates!

Update: Coinbase apologized and gave me bitcoins equal to the difference, so that I can sell the bitcoins and receive the dollars.  I consider this case to be suitably resolved.

You may also need to be careful about 3.6.4 in conjunction with this issue. From your chat, it seems that the transaction was cancelled. Following that, you have clause 2.4 that gives Coinbase 48 hours or more after you request your Bitcoins to return them to you to initiate another transaction.

That said, your sale of 60 BTC may nullify your "right" to retrieve the difference as it can be argued that you willingly waived your right to the previous amount by performing another transaction. Once again, this is not legal advice, and I highly recommend you consulting a practicing attorney to see what your options are.

Ken: Sorry about the confusion here, but it's something we should be able to correct

You got your coins back.
Coinbase said they were sorry.
That's a really good deal in Bitcoin Land. 

The problem is that you got the bitcoins back. If they were still holding the bitcoins I'd say that they are definitely stealing money. Hopefully you can work things out in court, it is quite ridiculous to need to do that though. I hope you keep everyone updated so we can learn from this. It is unfortunate that things like this happen but I guess that's just the way it goes when you are dealing with an entirely new type of currency.

Sounds like a case of greed on your behalf, I'd be pleased just to have a single bitcoin.

You had your coins returned, others such as myself haven't been as fortunate due to dishonest site operators.

You sent them virtual coins and received the exact same number of virtual coins back, they 'stole' nothing. It was an opportunity missed.

Greed....greed... greed.

Thanks for bringing up the Terms of Service, hellscabane.

So here is the relevant paragraph, with the key part in bold:


I updated the first post in this thread to include this information.

This is quite unfortunate. Looking at this, upon first glance, in the best case this is incompetence and design flaws whereas in the worst case, this could be downright market manipulation and possible fraud.

That said, in terms of the legal aspects, if your coins were showed as confirmed in your Coinbase wallet prior to selling, then you should be entitled to the amount that you transacted that day. However, there may be a clause in the ToS in which if you accepted your coins back you “willingly” revoked the contract of the original purchase price that you were entitled to.

I will assume that the burden of proof (in alignment with the ToS that you agreed upon) is on you, but from what I can gather, you may have some sort of case.

Please do not take this as legal advice as this is not what I am providing you; consult an attorney on what your options are and provide as much evidence as you have.

I agree that it was an error to start with, just some bug in their software.

I just edited my post to include my initial chat with tech support, which is just more evidence in my favor.

Just to be clear up front: this is not about a cancelled transaction.

On March 22nd I sent 60 BTC to Coinbase:


After six blocks I sold the 60 BTC to Coinbase:


Note that in the message Coinbase is acknowledging that I sold them 60 BTC for $33,713.51.  The money never arrived.  The transaction was not cancelled.  If it were, it would have said "cancelled" instead of completed.  If I had done nothing at this point I would have no money of either kind: the 60 BTC were permanently gone and I didn't have my $33,713.51.

So I went onto their tech support chat and here is the conversation that we had:


At this point the price had rallied.  If they had given me the BTC back then they would be losing money, because I would be able to sell the BTC for a much higher price, close to $40k if I remember correctly.  However I was content to get the money at the price that we originally agreed on.

Also this is how the Terms of Service say that things should be handled:


So I sent an email to tech support:



Here is his response:



So "some reason" being a bug in their software.  The problem with getting the BTC back is that prices had fallen quite a bit.  Here is the transaction of them giving us their BTC instead of our dollars.



Now one could argue that this is not a big deal, when trading you lose some and you win some.  I am not a trader.  I buy and hold and never sell because I am saving for my family's future.  I really, really need money right now to take a burden off of a loved one and so I forced myself to part with these bitcoins.

So I write back:


So now Josh should just recognize his mistake, take back Coinbase's BTC and give us our dollars.  Actually his coworker Alex just blew me off completely:



Umm.... then who can?  What a blatant lie.  Maybe Alex can't initiate a bank transfer, but if that is the case then why is he dealing with my case?  Shouldn't someone with the power to fix things work on my case?

So it was Friday night and we realized that we weren't going to get this issue resolved in our favor at least until Monday, if ever.  Meanwhile we have an urgent need for the money and the price is falling fast.  We think about suing Coinbase but we don't have the money to hire lawyers and we don't have years to deal with this problem.  We need money now.  So we decide, as an emergency measure to recover some of our funds, to sell Coinbase's 60 BTC in this transaction:


So we get most of the money that we need now, though it is going to be a hit on the bank account to make up the difference.  An additional benefit of doing this, is that the amount that they owe me still ($3965.55) is less than the maximum amount recoverable in my state's small claims court.

I decided to not post this until I got the $29,747.96 out of my Internet Credit Union account, just in case Coinbase tries to take the dollars back.

Update: Coinbase apologized and gave me bitcoins equal to the difference, so that I can sell the bitcoins and receive the dollars.  I consider this case to be suitably resolved.