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Coinbase is taking action to reduce the number of users who are locked out. He says that the effort is rewarding.
“Account freezes have been a bigger issue for a long time than Coinbase can accept,” said Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase. “We were able to list a bunch of fundamental reasons why it got worse in the first place, but more importantly, we made corrections a priority and we are making good progress.”
Dor Levi, the product's Coinbase VP, explained that he recently joined Coinbase with the goal of reducing his account lock number.
“Our limited experience hasn't seen my own bar,” Levi said.
Coinbase recently made several technical changes and improvements, including some of its infrastructure, teams and machine learning models. They were able to fine-tune the aforementioned ML model to tackle this issue.
“Account freezes are rare and are limited to situations where you protect legal obligations (such as sanctions or court orders) or users (such as fraud or account compromises), they are guaranteed,” writes Levi.
Armstrong and Levi have confirmed that account lock occurrences have fallen by around 82% within the past few months.
Coinbase often restricts user accounts when it is concerned about what is detected as potentially suspicious activity. This means activities that may violate the laws of the country, including fraud. Locked accounts can force customers to spend time jumping through various ID verification hoops and talking in support to try and solve the problem.