It always starts with savings.
A few cents here. A few dollars there. Slowly, the spreadsheet begins to smile. Someone in finance runs the numbers, floats the idea. “What if we outsourced support? Just the tier one stuff. Just the calls no one wants to take.”
And so it begins. A quiet offshoring.
In theory, nothing breaks.
The code stays in California. The assets remain in cold storage. The engineers stay well-fed.
But the humans—the ones who pick up the phone when your identity is stolen, or your password isn’t working, or your account shows a transfer you never made—those humans now live in a different timezone, on a different salary, in a different reality.
And that gap is where the risk lives.
This week, we learned that Coinbase had a breach, not because of a bug or a sophisticated attack on its cryptographic systems.
Because some support agents in India took bribes.
A few people got paid to look the other way. Or maybe not even that. Perhaps they just followed instructions they didn’t fully understand.
Either way, the result was the same: Personal data—names, addresses, government IDs—got handed over. And now, Coinbase is facing a $400 million cleanup and a stack of lawsuits.
The belief that you can decouple people from responsibility. You can atomize a business into “core” and “non-core,” and ship the non-core off to wherever labor is cheapest.
It’s a lie told in PowerPoint.
Because every interaction is based on trust. Every interface is part of the system. Every voice on the other end of the line is a door.
And doors can be opened.
We’ve spent two decades optimizing for efficiency and global labor arbitrage. Lowest bidder wins. And in the process, we’ve convinced ourselves that frontline workers don’t matter—as long as there’s a script in front of them and a manager watching.
But scripts don’t stop bribes.
And managers don’t know what they don’t want to see.
What’s wild is that this is Coinbase, a company that literally exists to secure value. It talks about decentralization and cryptographic trust and pours millions into security audits, pen tests, and high-assurance systems.
And it all fell apart because someone outsourced customer service to save a few bucks.
This isn’t about India. It’s not about geography. It’s about distance. Cognitive, emotional, and organizational.
The kind of distance where the customer isn’t real. The company isn’t personal. And loyalty is just a word printed on the breakroom wall.
In that kind of setup, why wouldn’t you take the bribe?
If your job is fragile, your pay is low, and the company treats you like a replaceable cog, ethics become a luxury.
And trust becomes optional.
There’s a reason attackers didn’t target Coinbase’s codebase. It was easier to target its labor model.
Because the easiest system to exploit isn’t technical.
It’s economic.
The breach didn’t come from India. It came from a culture that thinks you can separate the mission from those who carry it out.
You can’t.
Not in crypto. Not in healthcare. Not in government. Not in anything that matters.
If you outsource trust, don’t be surprised when it gets sold.
I am a Coinbase customer, and I really hope they contact me if my data was stolen. I'm not holding my breath.