Coinbase says hackers bribed staff to steal customer data, demanding $20M ransom

How can customer support operate without knowing anything about the customer?

A shared or hashed secret would do it.

Plenty of exchanges don't know their customers, and in fact that is how they get their customers.

Isn't the whole point of crypto to keep PII out of it completely? If not, what is all this non-sense for exactly, other than the typical goals of pyramid schemes?

Unfortunately government regulation does not make that possible for exchanges. It also is not the point of crypto.

Coinbase is a bridge between digital currencies and the traditional world.

The main point of crypto IMO is to have a large-denomination bearer asset.

This is overlooked most places but if you examine around the time the FATF finally pretty much eliminated bearer bonds, bearer stocks, and large bank notes was exactly the time crypto really took off.

Not if you are dealing with a regulated exchange that facilitates fiat money transactions.

You can receive crypto privately to your own wallet without sharing PII, without any exchange.

No. Coinbase deals with fiat money, therefore subject to AML and KYC regulations.

That's not related to customer support, though. It's more like customer surveillance.

this? https://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/bearer-instrument.asp

The question was about customer support. AML and KYC regulations do not require that customer support persons know your PII. That can be kept firewalled from them.

You know how your bank asks you to verify details when you call?

Without the right details the customer support people don’t get entry into the customers account details.

Banks have been doing this for 30+ years..

yes. IIRC ~2015 was when the last of bearer bonds/shares were pretty much all completely immobilized. I can't recall when the last ~1000 USD equivalent banknotes were printed but it was also close to that time.

CS can validate without knowing the details, the same way you don't enter a password and then check to see if that matches the password in the system.

The fact that they keep blaming overseas customer support is pure blame shifting - you still hired someone and gave them access to all this data, Coinbase!

We don’t know if they had access to everything. They got data for “less than 1% of monthly transacting customers”.

The PII is required by governments, to convert crypto money into real money.

Which is such a lame and flawed mechanism to avoid letting them access anyone's data. I mean what are you even trying to prove here? That banks care about customer's security when they can't even implement a secure 2FA which is not just an unencrypted text message

“Give a man a gun and he can rob a bank, but give a man a bank, and he can rob the world.”

It's simple. They want to centralize crypto and dickheads like armstrong are happy to be in line to make that happen. Just look at tether, what's the point of it? It's nothing but a front for inflating the price of bitcoin. It has NEVER been audited and has been found to NOT have any USD backing at all

> I mean what are you even trying to prove here?

That there are more options than holding your hands up and arguing the company couldn't have done anything further in terms of implementing effective controls.

This also wouldn't be particularly difficult to implement.

Where do you see blame, this is a fact and it's relevant.

If they didn't say this, there would be pitchforks out about not giving enough information.