Oh boy. Stupidity all around, by both Zecco and their customers.

It's absolutely insane to me that a brokerage would ACTUALLY execute trades based on that money! What kind of idiot at Zecco thought that was a good idea?

@humphrmi: Agreed. If the people who purchased beyond their (real) balances had gotten an extra paycheck in their checking accounts, would they have spent that money too?

Lawsuit potentially? I can't imagine what Zecco's lawyers had to say.

Is there anything more unprofessional??? If I were a Zecco customer I'd high-tail it out of there. You don't fool around with peoples money.

this is awful! zecco's clearly more at fault than the customers. some people just want to see how far they can go with things like that. shit, i'd have made it all the way to the "accept" button.

OMG that's hilarious. Being a former customer of Zecco, wish I'd stayed around longer to have seen this.

What is the evidence that Zecco did it as an April Fools joke? From the information here, it looks like someone messed with their system and caused it to happen without their knowledge. So the problem would be not that they're malicious jokesters, but that they allow malicious jokesters to creep into their system.

@humphrmi: Agreed. It seems that the saying "You can't cheat an honest person" applies here as well.

@Dancin' Hooooomeeeeeer!: No kidding. This kind of thing would cause me to lose all confidence in them as a brokerage.

@outoftheblew: I'm inclined to agree, someone seems to have jumped to the conclusion it was a deliberate prank on Zecco's part.

Even if it was, just as with bank errors, ATMs spitting out the wrong amount and cashing fraudulent checks from Nigeria, spending money that isn't yours will get you in trouble.

Aside from some speculation, there's nothing to indicate that this was anything other than a system glitch.

I'm not completely convinced the company was behind the balances- but I don't believe their responsibility ends there. Their duty is to protect the customers money while online trading. Of course, the customers who fell for these ridiculous balances instead of informing the company aren't out of the woods yet either. It was APRIL FOOLS DAY.

What's worse- a trading company thats susceptible to hackers that ADDED money, or just susceptible to hackers period?

Lucy, you got sum 'splainin to do.

@outoftheblew: That's surely going to be their story in any event, I'll wager!

Well, the April 1 timing does seem odd.

This is weird. If customers made a profit, are they allowing them to keep the money?

Wow. Wow. Wow.
It's a shame JP Morgan - the guy, not the brand - wasn't still alive. Think he would have looked forward to a tasty meal of their innards, customer and company alike. While alive, of course. For insulting Capitalism so gravely.

Uhh, Zecco's going to eat the transaction fees, right? Considering that it was their "joke"?

@Trai_Dep: Q: Does "April Fools!" count as an excuse during an IRS audit?

Lawyer up, kids.

I expect we're headed for a Zecco taxpayer bailout & bonuses all round for the execs...

@outoftheblew: Even worse in that case. Not Poor Judgement, but Poor Security....

@Dancin' Hooooomeeeeeer!: For real. There's a reason people prefer their banks and other financial institutions to project an image of "boring."

@1SQ: I'm sure some of the people thought they were cheating the system. But others thought it was an elaborate April's Fools joke. They may have thought they would receive a funny message when attempting to use the imaginary funds. The SEC needs to investigate exactly what happened.

If it was a mistake, it's not ZECCO's problem? BS! If it were your account and it went the other way because of a glitch, negative balance for the customer, making it impossible to make any trades or access their money. Everyone here would say the company is responsible!
The company is responsible! They should run a backup of the day before, subtract any fees that occurred during this time and give free trading for a day.
It was a joke, either on the company's part or a rouge employee, still their fault. They traded all the stock back to make themselves whole, so they need to drop the service/trading fees and refund any loses to make the customer whole as well.
CLASS ACTION!

@johnva: You're making the enormous assumption that Zecco actually planned this and that it wasn't some sort of glitch or malicious attack. The fact that they actually executed trades strongly implies that this was not their intention doing.

@silver-bolt: In reality, no online system is totally secure. Give a dedicated wrong-doer a couple of days and pretty much anything can be exploited.

@shmianco: Exactly. Woot's April Fool's Day Bag o' Crap was offered with a shipping charge of $1,000,000. I was ready to submit my order, but refrained "just in case." And of course, it was sold out within minutes, presumably not only to millionaires or those with future overdrafts.

I am a zecco user, I logged in to find my buying power at 6 million and some change. I assumed that something in the system was messed up and continued trading based on the money I knew I had in the account, not the insane number. Am I strange? it seems to me the reasonable thing to do is not spend what you know you do not have, it's like if the bank accidentally put money in your account... you know eventually the will catch it, so you might as well come clean and get it fixed.

Now if this was an april fools joke... that is pretty stupid ont he part of zecco, but foolish on customers to spend it as well.

I think the dumbest part was that the money was actually IN their accounts. And they could actually use it for spending. Sounds more like a scam than an April fools joke.

@Eyebrows McGee (on Twitter: LPetelle): Hey, I dig those TD Bank commercials with Regis & Kelly.

I dream of waking up and having Charles Schwab magically deposit millions in my accounts.... Just because it's magic money, it's still my magic money.

Maybe they thought Ed McMahon was working for Zecco..

Are these the same folks that find a million dollar bank error on their accounts and promptly go buy a Porsche?

Between zero day for that Conficker mess and April fools, frankly I'd be more freaked out and annoyed to find my balance was so far out of whack.

Isn't buying and selling without actual money or stock the way naked short selling works?

It's clearly NOT an April Fool's joke, but a serious system glitch. It's definitely not responsible to imply that, while Zecco was stupid enough to let this glitch flow through, that they'd be idiotic enough to intentionally play a joke like this.

So let's kick down the hyperbole a notch, because some people forget that The Consumerist isn't real news reporting or journalism, and thinking that Zecco really did play a monster April Fools joke intentionally. Clearly, that's not what happened.

Now, I would never, ever trade with Zecco after seeing something like this happen--this is BAD POOL. But that being said, the slant of the article, and especially the last sentence, is ridiculous.

Disclosure: Never traded with Zecco. Trade with Thinkorswim, who have a great sense of humor and would still never actually fuck with their customers' account balances.

Oh boy, what does the SEC have to say about this?

@outoftheblew: Absolutely. Worst Consumerist Headline Ever!

I worked in IT for a financial services company for 10 years, and I find it nearly impossible that a company would do something like this as any kind of officially sanctioned action. Much more likely to be one of the following:

* Internal hacker / disgruntled employee
* External hacker / malicious competitor
* System glitch (things go wrong the other 364 days of the year, why not April 1?)

Obviously Zecco screwed up majorly somewhere along the line, but it's irresponsible, if not outright slanderous, for Consumerist to say that they did it on purpose without any supporting evidence whatsoever.

Everyone is missing a very important part of the puzzle: no money was entered these people's accounts. Instead, the amount of margin/loans the traders could borrow was erroneously increased, and these people treated it like it was real money instead a loan.

This isn't like a bank accidentally depositing money into your checking account, but more like your credit card doubling your credit limit.

This sounds blatantly fraudulent on many, many levels. Zecco is gonna have some biiiig questions to answer pretty soon, and I don't think that the customers should be held culpable. Telling them that they have money they don't, then actually making market trades with that money? Hello?

@PollyQ: Yet you have as many unsupported hypotheses as any comments here.
And, I get the strong feeling that Consumerist columnists know the difference between libel and slander, which is something you can't claim...

I can't figure out who's stupider, Zecco or the idiots who purchased lots "assuming" it wouldn't go through!

What gomer green-lighted this?

@Trai_Dep: You miss the point -- I presented my hypotheses as being hypothetical. The Consumerist's headline stated outright that Zecco deliberately pulled a prank on its customers, with no hypothetical in sight.

And, yes, slander is spoken & libel is written, but I was using "slanderous" in its general dictionary definition rather than its strict legal sense.

@johnva: If it was a joke, they should have set up some kind of 'fooled ya' screen (possibly with a rickroll?) instead of executing the trades.

And joking around like that with peoples money in the middle of a recession is MEAN.

It would have been funny if they started offering stock in dead companies like TWA, Pan Am, or Pets.com.... but hand over a couple million in fake money and expect someone to get its a joke... stupid Zecco...

Zecco's Twitter feed doesn't help to clarify if this was an April Fool's joke or something gone terribly wrong.

At 6:17 AM, paul_irish wrote:

# @michieldeboer @tonyleachsf Love the $6.8 million I have now. As do my friends. :) Thx @zecco !!

At 8:16 A.M, Zecco replied:

@paul_irish Your temporary millionaire status has come to an end. We hope you did not spend the $6.8M in the meantime.

At 10:29 A.M., Zecco wrote:

@c_mpt_n @traderjon We're glad you are taking it as an April Fool's joke.

If this was some type of error or attack, Zecco was aware of it for several hours before they stopped it. It almost seems like some kind of Art Carlson Thanksgiving Day scenario.

@Eyebrows McGee (on Twitter: LPetelle): Isn't knowingly presenting false account balances and executing trades on those false balances just all kinds of securities fraud? This seems really illegal, and you're a lawyer so, what do you think?

I have my Roth IRA with Zecco. I had $63m of buying power and of course the though of buying a million shares of RIMM crossed my mind. But then I realized that I was an ADULT and that if it tried to play off an attempt to flip a few mill out of an illegal trade someone would probably catch it. Idiots. April fools joke with your trading account? I hope these people are responsible for at least some of any incurred losses. I don't want my brokerage going out of business because some idiot thought he'd play a "joke" and buy shares he couldn't afford. This is painful

@metaled: I think they should charge anyone that made a trade that they obviously afford. If someone went over by a few hundred bucks that's one thing. Anyone that tried to profit should be charged a fee and pay back some of the losses if there were any.

Right, because spending money we don't actually have never got us into trouble before.

Oh and the speedometer said 200, so I thought I could just go that fast Ociffer.