JohnMasone.com

A company I owned through TDAmeritrade was purchased by another company very recently. This resulted in all my stock in the first company being cashed out. So yesterday, I went online, did some researched, and picked a new company to put that money into. I placed the order.

Today, I went to log in to my account to see if the order went through, and to see if I'm up or down already :-D. But, I couldn't log in. When I try, I get a very general message saying "Unable to authorize access. Please try again. If you continue having difficulty, please Contact Us." OK, that doesn't really mean anything, maybe the system is down. So I wait a while and try again. Repeat. Repeat. Give up. Next step, give em a ring. I hold for a few minutes and get a girl on the line. Not India, this girl is clearly from somewhere in the middle of the USA.

So she proceeds to tell me that TDAmeritrade's third party consulting firm has indicated that my computer has been infected with malware. I need to run a virus checker first, then they will reopen my account. There must be some mistake, for you see, I have a Mac. Those weren't my exact words, but close to it. OK sir, well you still have to run a virus checker. I was getting annoyed, I insisted that I had a Mac, there are NO viruses or malware (proof of concepts mean nothing) out there. Furthermore, what does it even mean that a third party says my computer is infected, how would any third party know anything about my computer??? She began to describe the process, but before she ever actually said anything that made sense, she stopped and just reverted back to "we have a third party and they indicated some red flags from malware". She then again insisted that I have to run a malware checker before they will reopen my account. I'm starting to get very annoying, I again insisted that there is no such malware for Mac, and that there is nothing to check for.

So she told me to hold. I assumed she was talking to a manager or maybe even better, an actual person that works in their IT / security department? Someone who would tell her "oh he's on a Mac? Must have been a bug in our system, let him back onto the site!"

She came back after a few minutes. She told me… yes she actually TOLD ME, that she had just GOOGLED for 'Mac Viruses' and saw that there were viruses available. This is what "internet security" comes down to at TDAmeritrade. The customer service operator ran a quick google search, and based on that, makes decisions on the security of my account. And what about they're overall policy making? Do they only bother to check their system with Windows computers?

This surprise incompetence is very much on par with what I would expect from Comcast. I never would have expected it from Ameritrade!