Tuesday, March 17, 2009

More TD Ameritrade Spam

I haven't written about this in a while but, it is happening again. I am getting spam at my Ameritrade Email address. To protect my Email, I use a unique Email address for my Ameritrade account, which is accomplished through Yahoo's "AddressGuard" feature. Because I've only given this unique Email address to Ameritrade, they are supposed to be the only entity that knows this unique Email address.

However, I've recently gotten significant amounts of spam at the Email that only Ameritrade is supposed to know about. Whenever this happens, I will usually change my Email address to a new one, and delete the old Email address. This has happened four times already, and it seems that my Ameritrade Email address has been repeatedly compromised. I know that this problem has been an ongoing a security issue at Ameritrade.

Shortly after I posted my last article about TD Ameritrade Spam, TD Ameritrade announced that they discovered "unauthorized code that allowed an external source to retrieve certain client information" from their system. How can this "unauthorized code" magically appear in their software? Clearly this was an inside job, as it seems that TD Ameritrade has a more than a few disgruntled employees...

By contrast, the Email address that I use for E*TRADE, and several banks has never been compromised. There is also a reason why I cannot delete my existing Email address, and setup a new one with Ameritrade. It has to do with courtesy fill notifications. I have asked Ameritrade to change my Email address, but the courtesy fill notifications are on a different system that retains my old Email address. I spoke to Ameritrade's customer service people about this issue. But, the Ameritrade CSRs are so incompetent that they don't know how to change Email addresses for courtesy fill notifications. In fact, some Ameritrade employees aren't even aware that they offer a courtesy fill notification service.

DC

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