Why do you have nowhere to complain? Let's talk about the customer service dilemma in the encryption industry.

"The road ahead is long and has no ending; yet high and low I will search with my will."

I have always believed that customer support and customer service are among the most overlooked and least seriously discussed topics in the crypto industry. Despite playing a significant and indispensable role throughout the ecosystem, many people lack the attention it deserves.

On the surface, it seems to be an immature and even chaotic field. To address this, I spent five months delving into the issues currently faced by customer support. To my surprise, many of the seemingly mismanaged situations are actually more due to misunderstandings. Behind this seemingly chaotic and complaint-filled phenomenon, there is actually a systematic logic that I will try to outline, and I hope this article can serve as a reference for similar disputes in the future.

Category 1: PEBKAC (Problem Exists Between Keyboard and Chair)

Most of the time, the root of the problem actually lies with the users themselves. They transfer tokens to the wrong address or the wrong network; enter passwords on fake websites; fall into scams that are obvious to anyone with common sense; and have no understanding of concepts such as buying, selling, holding, soft forks, hard forks, airdrops, and staking.

The most common reason for such complaints is also very obvious: these issues have a self-fulfilling characteristic. If users knew from the beginning that the responsibility did not lie with the platform, they would not complain. However, in the crypto industry, these issues are almost inevitable—over 250,000 new users create wallets and attempt transactions for the first time every day. No matter how many experienced users there are, more "newbie babies" join every day.

Category 2: Smear Campaigns / FUD Agents

FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt) was originally a negative competitive tactic used between businesses to damage a rival's reputation by spreading rumors. However, in the crypto space, FUD has evolved into a kind of "culture," where some community members proactively attack project teams or service providers, gradually forming what is known as "Fudders."

The narrow definition of "slander attacks" refers to organized, planned, and systematic FUD. And based on my observations, both forms exist in the industry. You can see many seemingly consistent yet poorly crafted complaint texts, many of which are even generated in bulk using AI. The main characteristic? They don't care about solving the problem at all. They refuse to provide ticket numbers, do not seek customer service assistance, and only want to make noise. Their goal is not to resolve but to attack.

Unfortunately, this phenomenon is unlikely to disappear.

Third Type: Two Degrees of Separation

There are not many cases of this kind, but they are extremely complex to explain, involving compliance processes such as KYT (Know Your Transaction), KYW (Know Your Wallet), etc.

All financial institutions must comply with anti-money laundering (AML) and counter-terrorism financing (CFT) regulations, and crypto platforms are no exception. This is also why platforms require KYC (Know Your Customer) verification during account opening. However, KYC only proves that you are not a wanted criminal and cannot ensure that your source of funds is necessarily legal.

One of the benefits of blockchain technology is that almost all transaction records are publicly transparent (with the exception of privacy coins). Therefore, platforms typically check the deposit addresses and their transaction history. If it is found that these assets come from known fraud or attack events, the platform is obligated to freeze the deposit; if the issuing address is marked, processing will also be suspended.

Sounds reasonable. But the difficult part is the next section.

Money laundering is typically divided into three stages: placement, layering, and integration. Among them, "layering" involves obscuring the source of funds through a series of complex transactions. Therefore, the platform must conduct a traceability analysis of the previous steps of the fund flow. For example, if a user's wallet is legitimate, but the source of their funds is a hacker's wallet, then this user poses a significant risk. They could be an innocent intermediary or a conspirator.

Since the platform cannot determine whether it is innocent, things become more complicated. Users often say: "Just tell me where the problem is, and I'll provide the evidence." But the reality is:

1. Most jurisdictions prohibit platforms from disclosing details of ongoing investigations, and some even prohibit informing users that they are under investigation. The reason is simple: to avoid "alerting the enemy." Once information is leaked, suspects may flee, destroy evidence, or interfere with the case. Therefore, platforms usually can only respond with "temporarily frozen due to risk control reasons," which is actually the part that is most easily misunderstood.
2. Most platforms are not law enforcement agencies and have no interest in handling cases or making convictions. If the evidence is insufficient, they will unfreeze the assets; if the evidence is sufficient, they will report it to the regulatory authorities, and the platform does not take on the role of "judge."
3. Even more awkwardly, most users never check the source of their funds. They might come up with legitimate reasons (such as: "This is the receipt from the income I made selling my PS5"), but they cannot change the fact that the funds they received came from a wallet involved in a case. Having indirect contact twice is still high risk. Long-term interaction with suspicious wallets can even lead to their own wallet being marked.

These users are often truly innocent. At most, they have been exploited. But this does not mean that the platform can ignore these risk signals.

Fourth Category: One Degree of Separation

Although rare, I have witnessed it with my own eyes. Some "victims" are actually the fraudsters or hackers themselves. After their funds are frozen, they pretend to be ordinary users and file complaints, and they also seek help from KOLs and influencers to make their voices heard. When KOLs speak out of goodwill, they may not realize that they are potentially helping criminals.

Due to confidentiality regulations and considerations to avoid "alerting the snake by hitting the grass," the platform usually cannot publicly respond to these cases online.

Category Five: The Inevitability of the Long Tail Theory

This category is not a specific user group, but rather an inevitable result of the overall industry scale.

Imagine a platform with 10 million users, 10% of whom are active each month, which is 1 million people; among them, 1% encounter issues that require customer service assistance daily, resulting in 10,000 tickets; even if 95% of the issues can be resolved instantly, there will still be 500 that need further handling; and if 10% of those users choose to complain publicly, that means 50 complaints every day.

Seeing 50 negative comments every day seems serious on the surface. But the fact is: 99.9995% of active users either use it smoothly or their issues have been resolved.

Consequences and Summary

Summarizing the above situation, it can be seen that, apart from the first category, other types of users have ample motivation to make the issues public. Meanwhile, the platform either chooses not to respond for strategic reasons or is legally not allowed to respond.

I deliberately use the term "platform" instead of "exchange" because these issues are not specific to any one institution, but rather common challenges faced by the entire industry.

And the conclusion is: Customer service is always a thankless job.

The ideal outcome is to silently resolve the problem; the worst outcome is to have it infinitely magnified and watched by the whole network. However, they are an indispensable part of the industry's maturation process, even if they often become the "punching bag" on social media.

I'm not saying that all complaints are unreasonable. Education and technology can indeed prevent many issues from occurring.

• Can the response speed be faster? Of course.
• Can AI systems improve diagnostic accuracy? Of course they can.
• Can users reduce operational errors through learning? There is no doubt they can.

But the premise is: we must first understand the limitations that customer support faces at the structural and regulatory levels. They are not the enemy, but the people who "shield the platform" at critical moments.

These problems may never be completely resolved. But understanding is the first step. After reading this article, I hope we can have more understanding and empathy towards the customer service team.