Shenyu, the co-founder and CEO of Cobo, a digital asset custody solution provider, posted a post on the social platform yesterday with the title "The biggest natural enemy of coin hoarding is_?" and attached a post from a netizen on the social platform Xiaohongshu Share the case where its assets were misappropriated by the centralized exchange Coinbase.
Netizens scolded Coinbase for stealing user assets
On the 24th, a Chinese netizen with the pseudonym "Chu" on the social platform Xiaohongshu published an article titled " Mingqiang's coinbase, a complete record of Bitcoin investment rights protection ."
The article mentioned that this netizen was All in the crypto in 2017 and operated frequently in the past few years. In 2021, he decided to start hoarding coins. However, due to concerns that Huobi and Binance were frequently hacked and disconnected, he transferred all the coins to Coinbase, a legal trading platform in the United States, at the end of that year. After that, he would occasionally log in to his account to check his assets. situation.
However, in June this year, the netizen found that the Coinbase account could not be logged in. After consulting customer service, he found that the account had been canceled and the BTC in the account had been sold and sent to an institution in Wyoming, USA. The reason given by Coinbase was that the netizen's account had not been opened for a long time. Activity, assets are considered "Unclaim Property".
The asset is considered "Unclaim Property"
The relevant explanation on the Coinbase official website states that depending on state laws, accounts that have not been active for 3 to 5 years will be classified as Unclaim Property. However, the netizen logged in in February and March this year, so he believes that the reason given by Coinbase customer service Total nonsense. After netizens continued to ask and provided login credentials, Coinbase customer service said they were helpless and could only ask netizens to go to Wyoming's Unclaimed Property Division to get their assets back.
Since the incident, the netizen has been paying attention to the website of Wyoming's Unclaimed Property Division and discovered that his case was not the only one, but there were many similar cases, so it took the department three months to sort out these assets. The netizen also found his asset records after searching for many days, so he quickly searched for various information and tried to declare the recovery. However, since he had forgotten most of the personal information he had used to register the account, he believed the chances of recovering his assets were slim.
What is Unclaimed Property?
According to the official Coinbase website , your funds will be confiscated when the account owner has not made any contact or generated any activity for a period of time designated by state law (usually 3-5 years), at which point they are considered unclaimed. Claimed or abandoned property.
Forms of unclaimed property include, but are not limited to, items in checking/savings accounts, brokerage accounts, 401k accounts, retirement fund accounts, and safe deposit boxes.
The same question frequently circulates in the Reddit community
On the other hand, many netizens complained about the same problem on the social forum Reddit, describing that their accounts were closed and their assets were transferred to the Wyoming Unclaimed Property Department.
In many cases, it can be found that most of the accounts closed by Coinbase are because " the user established an account with Coinbase Kenya Ascending Markets, Ltd., which is currently closed ." And Coinbase stated that it has repeatedly tried to contact the user through the user's verified email address, notifying Regarding account closure, however, no reply was received from the user.
According to the picture provided by Xiaohongshu netizen "Chu", Coinbase customer service responded that his account was closed because he established an account with Coinbase Kenya Ascending Markets, Ltd.
However, many Reddit netizens also criticized: "The Coinbase APP does not have any notification", "The description of the e-mail is unclear, and it does not clearly state that the account should be closed"...
