someone hacks my ameritrade account

[cdrankwalter]

well i check my email friday to see that i have some email confirming trades from ameeritrade, however i have not made a trade in nearly a month, so i log onto my account and am in shock to see that someone got into my account and sold off all my positions and day traded penny's with my money and made me over 1000 bucks.  made sure that there were no withsrawals pending and there were not. i changed my name and password and username but im still scratching my head on this one. on a side not everyone of the positions i had owned are down today.

[gmarc66]

R U serious?

wow...thats nuts and scary.

can u find out who that good samaritain was so that he/she can do the same to my crappy portfolio. ...

u got real lucky there that ur money wasnt totally gone.

what did ameritrade say about this?

julia

[cdrankwalter]

well as soon as i noticed the trading activity i callled up amertrade without noticing what the person had actually done. since it was saturday he filed a fraued claim and told me to change my username and password and that i would get a follow up on it either tuesday or wednesday, i dont really know what they do in these situations but ill see what happens.

[Ramsburg]

Did you use your ameritrade account on other computers ? (job, cybercafe, etc)

[cdrankwalter]

i do access it in college which is a possibility

[Ramsburg]

i do access it in college which is a possibility

Probably by accident you saved your user/pass on that PC ? or someone was monitoring that PC ?

[tokyopua]

Wow, nice they made you money, I was always afraid that someone would just buy crap or transfer money to a swiss bank account, lol.

But, I should mention here that with Etrade I sleep a lot easier at night, even when accessing my account from a Starbucks on WiFi for every hacker/sniffer out there to see.  Why?  Because they have that awesome password randomizer device that you put on your keychain (I think it was free and I paid like $10 to get a backup one in case I lose the first one).  It adds 6 digits to the end of your password that you have to enter each time you log on.  That number changes every minute, so there is no way for a hacker to have that unless they also steal your device. 

Highly recommended to those worried about their account getting hacked, as its already hard enough to sleep at night with open positions without worrying about security also.

[AussieTrader]

Thats an interesting story. I had read a week or so back about an organised group of manipulators who were hacking into brokerage accounts liquidating assets then using the cash and trading certain penny stocks (which they had already taken positions in with their own money) running those stocks up by creating loads of buying pressure from the hacked accounts then selling their own positions into the upside strength for a nice profit.

Seems that is exactly what happened to you.

Interesting to see what Ameritrade do because as you said 1) This hacker boosted your account balance and b) If your holdings had not been liquidated your account would be down because the stocks you held were down.