“We are constantly monitoring for new threats and when we find fraud, we take steps to shut it down and remediate customers as appropriate,” Favreau said.
No Phones
For users who have seen money vanish from their accounts, resolving claims can be an arduous process. The Menlo Park, California-based company has no support line for users to call for help, leaving customers to rely on emailed responses that can take weeks, Bloomberg has previously reported.
Desperate users have turned regulators into their customer-service agents. This year through mid-October, there were 1,338 complaints filed to the Securities and Exchange Commission by Robinhood users with claims of hacking, data breaches, theft of funds, identity theft and fraud tied to their accounts, according to data from a Freedom of Information Act request. Robinhood agreed last week to pay $65 million in fines to settle SEC allegations that it failed to properly inform clients it sold their stock orders to high-frequency traders and other firms.
“It appears that Robinhood is falling far short of what customers have a reasonable right to expect,” said Barbara Roper, director of investor protection at Consumer Federation of America, an association of consumer-interest groups. “At the very least, I’d expect the company to offer a live chat option that would enable customers to get some assurance that their concerns had been heard and were being addressed.”
Robinhood has relied in part on external staffing firms to fill roles like customer support. But this year, as millions of new and often inexperienced customers have flocked to the app, the company has hired hundreds of support staff to fill offices across the country, often poaching them from bigger and more established rivals.
“We’re working on customer support across the board,” Vlad Tenev, Robinhood’s co-founder, said in a CNBC interview in October. “We’ve made huge investments and are continuing to make huge investments.
Reversed Decision
While many complaints are ultimately resolved, Zhu isn’t alone in having trouble finding recourse.
Joshua Kim, 32, signed up for Robinhood in October, planning on investing his money to save up for a cruise for him and his wife after the pandemic ends. He’d only been using it for about a month before the account was compromised, which he suspects was the result of his email being hacked.
The hacker sold his shares in Tesla Inc. and Amazon.com Inc., among others, and set up the cash management tool to transfer money from the Citibank account he had linked to Robinhood, according to Kim. Then, they used that to withdraw funds in Poland and Kansas City, Missouri. This all happened over the course of two days even though he asked that his account be locked on the first day, he said.
Customer service told Kim they’d investigate the incident, he said. After a few days, he got a similar email to Zhu’s, saying no fraud was detected and the money he’d lost -- about $2,800 -- wouldn’t be returned.