A month ago, we wrote about Brice’s struggles with E*Trade to recover the balance on an account they closed. After eight months of letters and phone calls, Brice got E*Trade to close the account, but it continued to accrue interest and Brice never received the balance. Finally, after launching eight Executive Email Carpet Bombs, Brice has his money.
When we posted Brice’s story, we listed the names and email address format for E*Trade’s executives, and encouraged Brice to fire away using the methods in The Ultimate Consumerist Guide to Fighting Back. The results:
Dear Consumerist,
I wrote you a bit ago for help getting my money back. I had emailed the etrade execs the day after the post aired on your website, and was ignored. I than decided I’d do one more mass emailing and then I’d just take them into the legal system. This time I kept the letter extremely short (the first one was about 4 sentences and asked them to rectify the situation). This one just said I’d like to be contacted with my account numbers and phone numbers provided. I decided I was not going to be easily ignored this time, so I sent 8 emails to every executive in 3 minutes time. 1 hour and 38 minutes later my phone rang from a fellow from etrade. We did have to jump through a couple hoops, all of which could be done via fax and he explained and got back to me on every occasion. Today, I got my checks and my accounts were successfully closed. On an ironic note, 3 days ago I received a letter saying that my account has only earned interest for a year and had no withdraws or deposits and if I didn’t withdraw or deposit with in the next year the money would be turned over to the state.
Hooray for Brice for staying on E*Trade for all this time, and kudos to E*Trade for at least accruing interest on the money they were holding hostage.
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Should this be taken as a sign the effectiveness of the EECB is weakening??
Clarifying question: did you send 1 email to 8 execs in the span of 3 minutes, or did you send 8 emails to all execs?
I wonder why the FDIC has not shut down these E*Trade jokers already. These guys need to get as much money as they can to keep their reserve ratio. Wonder why E*Trade and Countrywide Bank offer some of the highest MMA and CD rates? Now you know.
Wonder if other people have had trouble getting their funds back from E*Trade? Anybody hear of other people with this experience? I deal with AmeriTrade which is also on line and they are very prompt when funds are requested.
I have a savings account with ETrade. These clowns misspelled my name. I tried several times to get them to correct it and they ignore my request, each time.
Not a big deal, but a good example of their poor customer service.
How did he get such a ridiculous interest rate? I’m curious, because whatever he did, I want to do as well.
@dragonfire81:
I am willing to bet the EECB is weakening.
It this example, 8 messages were sent to how many execs? Maybe 100+ emails were sent.
In the old days a single certified letter would have been sufficient.
Of course email is cheaper.
There in lies the problem. High volume, cheap communication that is prone to being misused versus a single, slightly costly form of communication. If people are using the EECB for every minor complaint (the employee forgot to say thankyou, the employee gave me $0.03 wrong change, the employee’s hair was too long in violation of the dress code) then the EECB is going to loose the effectiveness for actual major problems. And $3195 is a major problem.
@coren: “How did he get such a ridiculous interest rate? I’m curious, because whatever he did, I want to do as well. “
3.25%, listed right on their front page.
I’ve used E*Trade for almost ten years, had some major problems getting started, every time I lose a card or change my address I have to find someone who can speak fake-English for me, but otherwise every bank has its problems and in the end you go with the best deal.
@bradanomics:
@Corporate-Shill: In the original post, I listed eight executives’ names whose email addresses didn’t bounce when I sent a test email. From what I understood, Brice sent eight emails each to all of the executives.
Also re: people sending an EECB for every little thing that pisses them off, I agree that this is a problem. The first instruction on our “How to Launch an EECB” page is to go through normal customer service first, but people don’t want to bother with that, and although I don’t blame them sometimes, it interferes with the really serious stuff. This is especially so with the sjobs@apple.com EECBs that readers sometimes CC us on: some of them are customer service travesties, but others are about very minor issues.
When I was having a problem getting some of my money from a company, and my single emails were being ignored, I sent 30 consecutive emails to both my rep and the company at large. Shockingly I received a response the next day.
I abandoned E*Trade before they even opened my account. I signed up online, waited, and never heard anything back. I called to find out what was going on and they told me my account had been put “on hold” because they needed to verify some information. I asked why nobody had ever told me about this and they said that they had so many accounts to process that they were not “proactively contacting customers” (i.e. they figure anyone who actually wants the account they signed up for should have to call them several times before they actually do their jobs).
I faxed them all the information they asked for twice and they still couldn’t get it up and running, (they couldn’t even verify that the faxes had ever been received) so I told them to cancel out my application and went to Schwab instead.
@strathmeyer: I doubt it – you can tell he doesn’t have a steady rate, as the amount he gets doesn’t get larger each month, it fluctuates. If he had a 3.25 interest rate, he’d have constantly growing numbers. Plus, the interest for 3112.89 is something like 10.12. He got way more than that. It’s looking like 4.something variable. Also, that account seems to require quite a bit invested in Etrade