Any guidance on the SEC link? Robinhood is currently royally boning me in the exact same way, and I want to get my money out as soon as possible. I already threatened to get the SEC involved a week ago, and still no response, so now time to actually do it. Would love a pointer in the right direction.

I'm thrilled to share tips about the process because despite reaching resolution, I think Robinhood has more to learn about how to appropriately handle this situation. There was a point in my process when there were 5 business-days of radio silence from support. IMO a support request from a client requesting access to their brokerage cash should be handled most expeditiously.

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Note: It was difficult to tell as a consumer which government entity was the most appropriate place with which to file a complaint. I will say that I filed both a CFTC "TCR" report and a SEC Investor Complaint form. From the former, I received no additional feedback (roughly three weeks later). From the latter, I received confirmation of the report immediately, and then confirmation of the complaint having been forwarded to Robinhood four days later. Shortly after that second confirmation is when I received a response from Robinhood support that the withdrawal ban on my account had been lifted.

File your report here: https://www.sec.gov/oiea/Complaint.html

Be specific about the action you've taken so far. Include your Robinhood Support request ID(s). Don't be heated or incendiary; simply provide the facts. Knowing Robinhood Support, the facts are sufficient for the SEC to take your complaint seriously.

Good luck.

Robinhood is a horrible company. I closed my account a year ago, asked for all my user data to be deleted and I STILL get emails every couple of weeks. I’ve opened tens of tickets to just get them to leave me alone and one year later I’m still nowhere. I’ve never been more pissed off with a company. Build a dam e-mail black list or actually delete my data like I requested.

I tried to order some fabric from a major, national purveyor of fabric early in the pandemic to make some baby quilts. The experience was not seamless. After they canceled 60% of the order and bungling the shipping on the remainder, I found I could not get unsubscribed from their coupon list.

Turns out, company press releases have live email contacts on them, and if you write a sufficiently fulminant email explaining that you'd like to never again hear from their employer, they'll direct it to somebody who will get you off the email list.

Worth a try?

> I tried to order some fabric from a major, national purveyor of fabric early in the pandemic to make some baby quilts. The experience was not seamless.

Pun intended?

I'm afrayed it was :-)

For those wondering like me:

> Fulminant is a medical descriptor for any event or process that occurs suddenly and escalates quickly, and is intense and severe to the point of lethality, i.e., it has an explosive character.

You can add Facebook to the list. No single point of contact, anywhere, and good luck if something happens and you need to reach them.

Robinhood is required by regulation to KYC their new account holders. Which typically is accomplished via doc auth.

This is applicable to all financial service companies, in the US at least.

I'm familiar with KYC. KYC is actually the very reason why Robinhood customers should not be required to re-verify their identity because it stipulates that institutions both acquire and retain the identity information of their customers.

With that said, my qualms are not with the fact that I had to re-verify; simply the manner in which it happened.

The fact that they re-requested my identity tells you that this verification process was not in support of their KYC obligation, but likely a fraud-prevention mechanism. Which puts the manner in which it happened entirely within their control from a product perspective.

So KYC them when you onboard them, NOT when they try to withdraw.

“Oh no, that might hurt our signup and trading figures?! “

Well, DUH, but anything to fudge the numbers right?!

Maybe if they make withdrawals even more difficult a percentage of users will abandon and then our assets under management numbers look better.

This is exactly what’s happening, stop forgiving the dark pattern behaviour under the guise of compliance.

That's why you should always start with small amounts, deposit $10, withdraw $10. If it works, repeat with $100 etc. Never keep large amounts there, withdraw as soon as trade is complete.

Alternatively, use a brokerage that's been around for decades and doesn't employ these dark patterns.

I agree, though these can deteriorate too. I've been with Vanguard for a while but was astounded as to how much the site and the customer support had degraded. Kind of worried about them but not enough to take a capital gains hit likely necessary to transfer the funds.

You can probably do an in-kind transfer (see [0] and the 4th FAQ at [1]) to another brokerage with no capital gains hit because you’re not actually selling the asset.

[0] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/kind-transfer-134617847.html [1] https://investor.vanguard.com/account-transfer/other-transfe...

You can do an in-kind transfer to move the assets over to a new firm without having to sell first. Definitely works for cash, stocks, mutual funds, and bonds. Not sure what else you can do it for

You don't need to liquidate and realize capital gains.

Weird how they let you fund your account and make trades, then, but only have an issue upon withdrawal.

If you want to read that in the most favourable light, perhaps that's more AML/CTF regs. You can't be laundering money or funding terrorism until you try and get cash _out_ of your account.

But like others are saying, there's ample evidence that Robinhood are despicable, so they sure as hell don't deserve and favourable interpretations of their trashier policies...

Obfuscating how the money enters the system and is transferred is a crucial part of laundering, so I'd disagree that laundering only happens upon withdrawal.

”Weird”. It’s an intentional UX design/friction thing. Hopefully their lawyers signed off on the interpretation of anti-money laundering laws is that they don’t count until the user tries to withdraw money.

Yes, that was the subtext of my choice of words.

Defining this acronym:

> Know Your Customer (KYC) are a set of standards used within the investment and financial services industry to verify customers, their risk profiles, and financial profile.

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/k/knowyourclient.asp

Calling KYC a set of standards is a bit if a misnomer. KYC checks are a legal requirement in the banking industry.

Since every company is a tech company now, I feel like they’re all inspired by the best (FAANG) and use tech in creative ways to increase their revenue (dark patterns).

Ubiquitous and Best are not synonymous

Are highest market cap companies synonymous with what most bean counters might consider "best"?

I personally think PE ratios are like score cards for what's best amongst businesses.

> They allow you to deposit and place trades, but as soon as you attempt a withdrawal, they notify you that you have to re-verify your identity with them.

Do they allow all trades, or only trades involving the newly deposited funds and descendants of such trades?

That might be an interesting approach to trying to lessen the harm of a false positive from their fraud detection. Essentially put a complete activity block on everything currently in the account (money and stocks), but only block withdrawals on things added to the account after the fraud detection hit.

If it turn out to be a false positive then it is still pretty annoying, but at least you get to continue with some activity so you account isn't totally useless while you get reverified.

If it turns out that the account has actually fallen into the hands of a scammer, they can't harm what is already in there and if they put some of their own funds in to try to trade for some reason then that ends up as a gift to you when you get the account back.

I'm not sure if it's possible to make that distinction. Trades are funded by brokerage cash. From the customer perspective, brokerage cash is a pool of cash available for trading or withdrawal. It may have originated from an ACH, wire, trade liquidation, or a combination of any of those things.

However, I am confident that I funded trades from deposits that were made after the withdrawal ban was put in place. I made multiple deposits over ~8 months in which the withdrawal ban was in effect, and those deposits funded multiple trades. Which means Robinhood is happy to deposit and trade funds from an account in an "unverified" state, but not allow withdrawals. If my account was truly compromised, justifying an unverified state, then I wouldn't want them funding trades from an ACH transfer from a bank account that was added when it was in a verified state.

The policy, whatever it may be, clearly serves Robinhood's purposes and not the customer's.

A lot of banks and other financial institutes now require a lot more identification then before. I remember opening accounts with just my driver's license number or SSN, but now they ask for my photo and so on. Maybe KYC regulations are putting some pressure on them or something. I usually just drop the account if I see too many hurdles - I am fine with having to work to earn my money, but having to work to give my money to somebody is a bit too much for me.

KYC is a legal requirement for the banking industry.

Yes, there are KYC regulations - but they have been around for a while. And still banks didn't do it in an intrusive manner that some of the newer companies do it.

In my experience (and the industry I'm in), requiring identity verification upon withdrawal is an anti-money laundering measure, and often one required by legislation rather than company policy.