I’ve had it with this company.

I once used them for all my stock transactions.  And I used them extensively.

But not anymore.

Ameritrade, now TD Ameritrade after merging with TD Waterhouse, is a company that happily and repeatedly violates the law.

You see, I generate new e-mail aliases for every organization I deal with online.  That ensures I know precisely who is giving my information to spammers if I start receiving unsolicited advertisements at any of those addresses.

For instance, I currently have hundreds of them in play for mailing lists, online stores, brokerages, banks, credit cards, and everything else.  Each one gets a personalized address that is never used anywhere else.

Why, then, do you think my Ameritrade e-mail addresses have always been the target of stock-related spam?

Coincidence?  Hardly.

It could be thought of that way if it happened once.  But it’s happened FOUR TIMES with FOUR DIFFERENT E-MAIL ALIASES!

To pour salt in a very open wound, I finally got one this week sent to my latest Ameritrade address using my previous address as the name (e.g., “alias1@whatever” <alias2@whatever>).

How’s that for spittle in the eye…

I’ve written to Ameritrade on many occasions about this.  I have ticket numbers and communiqués and all sorts of documentation.

Oh, and I also have every spam message sent to those aliases.

I find it amazing that no other alias has ever suffered the same fate.  If they were compromised, I dropped them like a bad habit.  And the spam stopped.

But not with Ameritrade.

So long as I’ve had an account with them, my e-mail addresses have been compromised on a regular basis.

To make matters worse, they’re selling them to spammers pushing stocks—usually penny stocks in pump-and-dump schemes.  How dare they!

So I’m here to tell you that Ameritrade is a scammer acting illegally to support spammers by violating the CAN-SPAM act, FTC rules regarding brokerage privacy, federal laws regarding privacy, their own privacy policy (meaning breach of contract), the implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing, criminal negligence statutes, and a litany of other criminal and civil laws.  They wait a few months, and then they sell the account information again and again and again.

AND I HAVE ALL OF THIS FULLY DOCUMENTED AND PROVABLE GOING BACK YEARS!

If you have an account with them, cancel it immediately.  If you were thinking of getting an account with them, don’t do it.

TD Ameritrade acts illegally, and they do it repeatedly.  I’ve provided them ample documentation to show this is happening, something I’ve done THREE TIMES already.

Yet nothing has changed.  As of this week, my fourth e-mail alias has been compromised and is now receiving stock spam.

Pathetic.

I’m reporting them to the FTC, the FCC, the BBB, and I’m contacting my attorney to see what can be done.

Oh, and I’m also contacting my old friends at ABC in case they’d like to do a little investigative reporting on this issue.  I’m sure the American public would love to know TD Ameritrade is violating the law to make money, and they ignore reports of the problem and go on doing it year after year.