Continuing our commitment to customers: introducing phone support for ATOs

By Casper Sorensen, Vice President, Customer Experience

At Coinbase, our goal is to be the most trusted crypto platform. Our security team significantly invests to protect our 68+ million users.

We take many steps to protect our customers from account takeovers (ATOs), which are often caused by phishing campaigns, SIM swaps, or support scams.

• First, every customer is opted in to two-factor authentication by default. This level of security is not the default for many traditional financial institutions and other technology platforms. But at Coinbase, we believe this extra helps provide important baseline protection for our customers.
• Second, we require device verification for all customers when they log in from a new, unrecognized device. This provides yet another line of defense against potential attacks.
• Finally, we encourage customers to use the most advanced hardware security keys available, such as Yubikeys. Yubikeys provide the most powerful two-factor authentication available on the market today.

As a result of these protection efforts, only a small number (less than .01%) of customers have been impacted by account takeovers. In the rare event that a customer notices a potential account takeover, we provide multiple channels for customers to quickly and easily lock their account so no further unauthorized activity can take place.

Today, we’re beginning to roll out phone support for ATOs, to provide customers with a live agent to kick off an investigation. If you believe you’re a victim of an ATO, please call +1 888 908–7930 or visit our support page to protect your account and get help.

Since January, we have improved our customer support by increasing our support staff headcount by 5x, providing self-service messaging prompts within the product itself to guide our customers through challenging transactions, and we’re scheduled to roll out live messaging as a new support channel later this year to provide real time support for our customers.

Our goal is to protect our customers as they participate in the cryptoeconomy while also providing them the best user experience possible. That said, we recognize that our work is never done when it comes to security and support — and they remain a top priority for Coinbase.

Continuing our commitment to customers: introducing phone support for ATOs was originally published in The Coinbase Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.