I suggest you learn the details before you spout off nonsense. You obviously don't have a clue how the device works. I've had one for about a year now and being logged into to TWS wouldn't help me get money out of the account if I don't have my little gizmo.
He's right -- find the other posts about this on ET. The scam artists get into your account and use it to buy some penny stock they bought in their account, then your buying drives the price up and they sell it at the artificially high price, and you're left holding some penny stock POS. Remember that most of these scammer will go for the low hanging fruit -- etrade, td slaughterhouse, etc. If IB makes it very difficult to do, they'll move elsewhere so I applaud IB for their efforts -- I just wish we got more notice and more ways to block the scams.
Like we said on another thread: IB should allow custmoer to unauthorize the trading of penny stocks rather than this stupid measure.
You can complain to IB management here: http://www.interactivebrokers.com/en/general/contact/feedbackForm.php?ib_entity=llc
Blocking penny stocks is not sufficient. I can think of another way to scam your account. I'm not going to tell you how here because some wannabe hacker's probably reading this forum. Brokers do need some type of physical device that you carry in your posession -- a keyfob password generator, a fingerprint reader, whatever.
As long as the opt-out option is there its fine. In a previous thread an IB employee said their will be an op-out option. This email is only for advisor accounts at this point but based on the previous thread its going to be for all accounts very shortly..... Without an opt-out option it will effectively kill automated trading at IB. At which point auto traders need to start looking elsewhere....
An ATS is really unworkable if you need to enter the code every time TWS connection to the server is dropped. Hopefully they have coded it so that the challenge code is valid for the life of the TWS Process. If so you only to need to manually enter the code once a day (It might spoil your beauty sleep though). TWS doesnt crash that often and you can be alerted if it does. Inconvienient but it doesnt kill it. But i would agree that having to enter the code everytime the connection is dropped will kill a lot of automated systems. If there is no opt out, then an automated SD would solve alot of these issues but it doesnt exist yet.