Today, Feb. 17, Visa and payment processing company “Worldpay” published a joint statement on the Coinbase blog, taking blame for charging Coinbase clients multiple times for the same deal.
Before admitting fault in the statement issued by Coinbase today, Visa had at first shifted the reponsibility back to Coinbase, telling the Financial Times on Feb. 16 that it had “not made any systems changes that would result in the duplicate transactions cardholders are reporting.”
However, the latest statement from Visa and Worldpay on the Coinbase blog clarifies:
“Over the last two days, some customers who used a credit or debit card at Coinbase may have seen duplicate transactions posted to their cardholder accounts. This issue was not caused by Coinbase.”
Coinbase has stated the mistake initiated from a change of the merchant category code (MCC) for crypto purchases earlier this month, which meant that crypto payments by card would be processed as “cash advances”. The extra charges were a result of Visa reversing and recharging transactions due to the MCC code change, according to the Coinbase report, Feb. 15.
Worldpay and Visa write that all of the reversal transactions should have been issued, and will be reflected in the clients’ account balances within a few days. The statement concludes:
“If you continue to have problems with your credit or debit card account after this reversal period, including issues relating to card fees or charges, we encourage you to contact your card issuing bank. We deeply regret any inconvenience this may have caused customers.”
B. Armstrong, CEO and co-founder of Coinbase, wrote that he was “glad to see the record set straight on this”, attaching Visa and Worldpay’s joint statement:
The debit and crebit card problems on Coinbase come after a slew of large banks around the world banned credit card purchases of cryptocurrencies, and in some cases debit card purchases, beginning earlier this month.
