how about this situation: an account owner resides in US, he goes on vacation and trades periodically from abroad for 1 month, at the same time his relative trades from the same account from US because the guy abroad can't always monitor the account. Is this legal?
Maybe the party overseas, on that IP, has prior issues with IB or is on some watch list that the OP is not familiar with. To reveal that information would open up IB to slander charges ... whatever.
Which location outside the US? Since you dont mention where it was, we can only assume its a dodgy country ..
==================== Kic-king; Yes , according to another elite trader that happened.He had a difficult nickname, difficult nature .Its a matter of public record but dont want to rehash the whole matter. IB handled that one well also, IB kicked him with words; kept kicking him ,until he decided to terminate the relationship . Its always tough being fired or terminated, so all who posted probabily will benefit in some way, by sharing .
If you really want to blame someone , blame the scum that create problems. And next time you get the chance, bring the scum down. You see, it is your business when folks are crooked. Causes you unforeseen issues.
Sounds like an excellent reason to terminate an account. I assume that this is either not allowed or that the login was created in a manner that caused a red flag. As an IB customer, I'm very happy that they are being extremely strict about these things.
let's forget about a secondary user trading from another (shaddy?) country. how can an account have a secondary user in the first place (even if trading from US)? who pays taxes in this case? i speculate that a secondary user can be allowed only if the account is an LLC. but what does not make sense here is that OP states that the secondary user was created and IB permitted this.
This sounds strange. Why not just let the non-US resident use the SAME password? I believe there is something in the agreement with brokers like IB that prevent the accountholder from giving others access. There is more than just international or money-laundering. Some people will access an account, and attempt to divert the funds to another bank, etc. This action was begging for attention
Having a similar issue, added another user (family member) in the same country (in EU), now in liquidation only mode for over 2 weeks. Calling every other day and they keep promising to fix the issue (promise to call back as well while never doing it). This seems to be a way to get rid of successful short sellers, next thing will be keeping only the losing traders to prop up the MM business and achieve even higher profit margins. It's the only possible reasoning I can see right now. Why I don't just leave IB? I programmed my systems using the IB API in good faith, thought it was a safe bet. Obviously I was wrong. The guys who praise IB for actions like this will find themselves in a similar situation at some point, then it won't be so awesome.
IB should come on ET and outline, in broad brushstrokes, what types of accounts and activity they will close. Also if they bar (for life?) the patronage of that client. It would also be helpful if they could help legitimate traders avoid inadvertently triggering this type of action unnecessarily. I'm going to assume IB employees still monitor ET, and hope someone can address those points.