Monkeys create yet another mess

Some scammers bribed a bunch of overseas customer support agents working for Coinbase (mostly contractors in India) to sneak out personal data from like 70,000 accounts. Stuff like names, emails, addresses, transaction history etc. got stolen.

The bad guys then used that info to pull super targeted scams: calling or messaging people pretending to be Coinbase support, saying "your account is hacked, quick transfer your crypto to this safe wallet" and sadly some folks got tricked and sent their coins straight to the scammers.

Coinbase got hit with a $20M ransom demand, told them to pound sand, and instead put up a $20M bounty. They're now voluntarily reimbursing the victims who lost money, plus beefing up security: total bill for them could hit up to $400 million (reimbursements, fixes, legal stuff).

Latest update: Just a couple days ago (Dec 26), Indian police in Hyderabad arrested one of the ex-agents involved.

Customer service is arguably one of the most important aspects of a business. I don't see why there's always a need to cut corners here. Perhaps this will be a lesson for companies not to outsource to other countries and to implement less monkey-like agents and especially protocols.

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Coinbase gave random Indian employees they were paying slave wages access to everyone’s personal info and then got mad when they got bribed. For every rep that goes to jail they should have to send one executive as well.