E*Trade, TD Ameritrade Targeted in Brokerage Fraud (Update1) By Bradley Keoun Oct. 23 (Bloomberg) -- Customer accounts at online brokers including E*Trade Financial Corp. and TD Ameritrade Holding Corp. have been infiltrated by computer hackers in Eastern Europe and Asia in one of the biggest cases of identity theft to strike the U.S. securities industry. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the NASD are trying to unravel the fraud, which has cost New York-based E*Trade at least $18 million and caused losses at Ameritrade of Omaha, Nebraska, company officials said. In one ``pump-and-dump'' scheme the SEC uncovered, thieves used customers' money to drive up the prices of little-traded stocks and then sold shares they bought earlier at a profit. ``The perpetrators were more organized, and it was a bigger issue this quarter than it had ever been before,'' E*Trade Chief Operating Officer Jarrett Lilien said in an interview. ``It wasn't just hitting one company, it was hitting everybody.'' Full story: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=a4OY4cfzvdYY&refer=home Super bummer..... Don
Scary stuff !! I think all brokerage firms should institute a 1 week hold on outgoing funds. That way, scamsters who want to "pump and dump" will not be able to quickly siphon off the ill-gotten gains from their accounts and disappear. E.g. if stock X shows unnatural activity, then the exchange/SEC will have a week to act and ascertain if there was any illegal activity and find out who profitted from it as well. A week is sufficient time for ripped-off folks to lodge a complaint and alert the brokerage/exchange/FBI etc.
I was warning about these rampant and absurd pump and dumps 6 months ago or longer. The sec should have looked into it and shut it down long ago. Eurotrash needs to be disinfected.
With all these online accounts from banking to trading I almost think its worth assigning customers new account numbers and force them to change their passwords every so often. Has it gotten to the point where you have to keep changing brokers and banks just to keep your accounts sufficiently hardened and safe? The brave new world of the Internet.
Some banks provide their customers with a hardware key that produces a unique key for each login session in addition to their password. That way even if a keylogger is installed by hackers inside your PC and intercepts your login and password information, they can¢t connect to your account because there is no way to reproduce the changing hardware key. The hardware key costs less than 10$.
i do not understand why more companies do not implement token IDs. By the way, these device batteries are good for years. As a precaution, you can order a new token once a year or replace battery.
Online hacking of brokerage accounts is becoming more and more common place. Very scary indeed. Picture having a few million in your brokerage account only to awake the next day and find it ALL GONE....