Coinbase “does a terrible job” of guarding against unauthorized access, More than $200,000 in cryptocurrency stolen from a Coinbase Inc. account holder
As the market for cryptocurrency expands year after year, hackers and thieves are more active than ever, preying on the money available through online exchanges. Every year, hackers take a different amount of money. In 2020, crypto criminals stole $1.9 billion.
Recently, A Coinbase Inc. account holder’s, account got hacked. He claimed that after hackers hijacked his account and depleted his funds, he tried to contact customer care at the bitcoin exchange for days before he eventually succeeded in doing so. Manish Aggarwal’s attorneys alleged in a proposed class-action complaint filed on Tuesday in federal court in San Francisco that at that time, more than $200,000 in cryptocurrency had been taken from his account.
According to the complaint, Coinbase “does a terrible job” of guarding against unauthorized access and theft and “an even poorer job” of assisting users whose accounts have been compromised. In response to a request for comment, corporate representatives in San Francisco took some time to respond. Instead of connecting Aggarwal to a customer service representative who could have helped him, the company routed him. According to Aggarwal’s lawyers, the automated complaint processing system was “unable to rectify the theft of his savings through its automated complaint processing – a recursive loop of impenetrable screens that prevented him from explaining his situation to any human being and was incapable of doing so.”
The lawsuit claims that on April 24, hackers used 6,000 distinct transactions to steal $190,000 from Aggarwal’s account over the space of 49 minutes.
Aggarwal claims that Coinbase turned down his request for payment for the missing Bitcoin. Because he is suing “to be made whole,” he wants to represent other Coinbase investors who have suffered comparable losses. The current case is Aggarwal v. Coinbase Inc., 3:22-cv-04829, Northern District of California, U.S. District Court (San Francisco).
