by Pam Martens and Russ Martens at Wall Street on Parade
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is the federal agency that was created under the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010 in response to Wall Street’s harrowing abuses to average Americans in the leadup to the financial crash of 2008. One of its key benefits is that it has a complaint database where consumers can post their complaints to the agency, and the general public and reporters can read those complaints on a public website. The general public benefits by seeing what types of complaints are being made against a financial institution they might be considering doing business with and reporters can look for dangerous patterns that are emerging.
We delved into a specific area of complaints at the CFPB yesterday. We put the word “Bitcoin” into the search box and pulled up 1,031 matches. Next we searched under the word “crypto” and pulled up 885 matches. Considering that perhaps (generously) one in 1,000 people in America have heard about this complaint center and perhaps one in 2,000 would take the time to file a complaint, that’s an enormous number of complaints.
It didn’t take us long to zero in on the company that was getting the bulk of the complaints. It was the cryptocurrency exchange, Coinbase, that became publicly traded on Nasdaq to much fanfare on April 14 of last year. So we entered the word “Coinbase” into the search box and got an astounding 3,732 matches. To wrap your head around just how astounding that number of complaints is for such a young company, we put the words “Goldman Sachs” into the search box and pulled up only 1,193 matches – and that’s over the span of more than a decade that the CFPB complaint center has been alive and the “great vampire squid” has been “wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money,” to quote Matt Taibbi’s take on Goldman Sachs.
Coinbase’s website carries the slogan…
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