Following the path of Binance and Kraken, the crypto wallet and exchange Coinbase also presented us with some technical problems, which were disclosed in a post on their blog yesterday, February 15th. Transactions that occurred between January 22nd, 2018 and February 11th, 2018 were susceptible to excessive charges and/or refunds when purchasing cryptocurrency with credit or debit cards.
In a Reddit thread, they attributed these errors to changes performed on Visa’s Merchant Category Code (MCC) for digital currency purchases. Merchant Category Codes are four-digit numbers that classify businesses or services by predefined categories, and the number attributed to an organization may change the rules by which their credit card payments work. In that case, according to their Reddit thread, this new code will allow large banks and card issuers to charge consumers additional fees, expressing their apprehension that this change may result in additional “cash advance” fees for debit and credit card purchases, inherent for the kind of business associated with the new MCC code – they alleged that they are working with major card networks to avoid it, though.
Coinbase did not offer a fancy discount “to show their gratitude” like Binance did, but they apologized and ensured that each affected consumer will be refunded fully for any excessive charge over the next few days, an attitude which didn’t seem to be enough to make their customers’ satisfied, as their blog post’s, comments, and Reddit’s threads were not exactly amiable these last days.
With some users were reporting charges as high as 50x, resulting in $67k of overcharging, the atmosphere over Coinbase’s Reddit, judging by their users’ threads, was overall awfully tense, with threads threatening to sue Coinbase and emphatically angry reports of money losses popping up every minute.
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