Coinbase puts the blame on Visa for overcharging buyers

A huge scandal just hit the cryptocurrency market, as Coinbase reportedly charged several buyers for up to 50 times their original purchase, due to a technical issue. According to TNW, the exchange desk is now putting the blame on credit card company Visa for the bug which created this entire situation.

Visa denied everything immediately

“Visa has not made any systems changes that would result in the duplicate transactions cardholders are reporting,” a Visa spokesperson told the above-mentioned source. “We are also not aware of any other merchants who are experiencing this issue.”

“We are reaching out to this merchant’s acquiring financial institution to offer assistance and to ensure cardholders are protected from unauthorized transactions,” the statement concluded.

Yesterday, numerous Coinbase users started complaining on Reddit about the ridiculous charges attracted by their cryptocurrency purchases, some of them saying that they ended up paying up to 50 times the original price.

Shortly after the news made it to the mainstream, Coinbase declared that they’re investigating the issues and claiming that it must have something to do with the recent changes to the MCC code, made by banks and financial institutions.

“We have identified a solution and future purchases will not be affected. We will ensure any customer affected by this issue is fully refunded. We expect these refunds to happen for customers automatically through their bank,” the exchange was saying.

Who is to blame for this after all?

It didn’t take long and they shared a status update on Twitter, revealing that it was actually Visa who “changed the MCC for digital currency purchases to a code that allows large banks and card issuers to charge customers additional fees.”

In the meantime, Coinbase announced that all additional charges will be refunded, but without giving an exact date for this. Currently, they are arguing with Visa over who should take the responsibility for this entire situation. A big amount of cryprocurrency investors were affected by this error, as some of them ended up with empty bank accounts.