Coinbase denies users access to their account records, prevents users from doing their taxes.

tl;dr - Coinbase closed my account and has blocked all access to my account records that I need to do my taxes.

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I'm one of those people that lost money having their account closed in the middle of a trade and was never given a reason why. Though I can think of several reasons they might have done it.

I ran BTC-TC (btct.co) and was fined by the SEC for doing it. I paid my fine, there were never any criminal charges involved, and the shutdown was orderly.

I also used btc-e.com quite a bit back in the day. Not that there were many other choices.

I have never had a darknet market account, or done anything illegal with my coins.

Ultimately, it's their right to close my account. But not in the middle of a trade. They had a fiduciary duty as my broker to do what was in my financial best interest. That's the law. They could have completed the trade, THEN closed the account. Instead, they went to extra effort to back out the trade, costing me an approximate 9% gain as the bitcoin price rose while they had custody of my funds.

Now they have not only closed my account, but they are preventing my access to the records I need to meet my legal obligations with my Federal and State taxes. They still allow me to log in, but reject API requests and redirect all requests to coinbase.com/reports to http://bit.ly/1lLBDoc.

When I closed BTC-TC - a one-man hobby site - I rewrote the code to allow continued access to account records via API and CSV download, and kept the site online well after tax season, at my out-of-pocket expense. How is it that Coinbase, with their millions, can't figure out how to handle this stuff?

Why post this publicly? Other than just feeling butt-hurt? (which I am not going to deny... I've sent many friends and family to Coinbase.) Because I want them to improve! ...and I don't think any of my back and forth with "support" is going to achieve the awareness necessary.

So here it is... Coinbase... get with it! Be the service we all want and deserve!

Update & Add: I have received XLS files from Coinbase. Here's to hoping they fix the system so no one else has to deal with this in the future. I can't imagine it'd be all that hard to send the files with the cancellation notice.

I'll also add that this is not a case of support not responding. I made my initial request November 24, 2015 and support promptly replied the next day telling me to go to coinbase.com/reports. Problem is that that doesn't work, and they've been cancelling accounts for years. Plenty of time to hammer out the details.

I had another thread with support asking them to stop sending me emails for services that were no longer available to me. Should be automatic, no? Account cancelled? Stop spamming. But it's not.

Submitted January 26, 2016 at 03:40AM by eburnside http://bit.ly/1lLBDod