Another Reason I am Glad I Switched From Zecco....

See Article Here.

On April 1, many of Zecco's customers (Zecco says only 1%) logged into their accounts to find that they had millions of dollars available to trade - and the system allowed them to trade it!

Now, I must say, if I logged into my account and it showed millions of dollars, I'm going to realize that there was a mistake and most likely I am not going to be able to keep it. Many of those people actually traded with it (I guess one guy even bought one million shares of AIG). That really was just foolish! That would be the same as if you found a million dollars in your checking account and you took it out and spent it all, and then the next day the bank realized the error and wants the money back.

To complicate the matter even more, I guess when Zecco realized the mistake, they went through and sold all the shares that were purchased with the money, and many people are claiming they were charged a $19.99 broker-assisted trading fee for it (Zecco wasn't very clear on this in their response). I don't know if that would be right of Zecco to charge them the fee, but if you went out and traded with that money without making sure that it really was yours, you almost are asking for it.

Zecco claims that this has nothing to do with an April Fool's Joke (I gotta admit, that's kinda hard to believe) but that it was a problem with data coming from a vendor (I really don't understand that - why would a vendor be responsible for my information being correct?). Whether it was an April Fool's Joke gone bad that they tried to cover, or it truly was a problem with a vendor, or whether someone hacked into their system, the whole thing really draws me away from Zecco.

I was almost (let me emphasize the almost) thinking about continuing to use Zecco, after all $4.50 trades are pretty good, and Tradeking (I haven't used it yet) seems to be a pain with putting money in your account (a 5-day hold), but after this, I don't think I will ever consider using them again!