Nearly 2,000 Robinhood Accounts Were Hacked And Irate Customers Had No One To Call For Help

Robinhood, a no-fee online trading app popular with young retail investors, discovered in an internal probe that nearly 2,000 of its customer accounts were recently hacked and their funds stolen.

Bloomberg reported that the latest development indicated that the hacking was more widespread than previously thought.

The online brokerage earlier claimed that only a “a limited number” of customers were targeted by hackers who –they claimed -- broke into personal email accounts outside of Robinhood.

The hacking spree raised a torrent of anger and frustration from users on social media who complained, among other things, that Robinhood has no customer service phone number to call. The company has more than 13 million customer accounts.

“We always respond to customers reporting fraudulent or suspicious activity and work as quickly as possible to complete investigations,” the company emailed to Bloomberg.

Some hacked customers said they do not believe their personal email accounts were compromised as Robinhood alleged. Others asserted their brokerage accounts were illegally accessed despite the use of two-factor authentication – where a computer user must use two pieces of information to gain access to their accounts.

Lena Williams, a human resources professional in Chicago whose Robinhood account was hacked on Sept. 10, said her emails and tweets to the company were not answered until this week.

Miah Brittany Laino, an Arizona resident whose account was also hacked, plans to quit Robinhood.

“I don’t want to sell right now,” she said. “But I’m not going to put any more money into it. I don’t really trust them.”

Pruthvi Rao, a Chicago software engineer, saw $2,850 mysteriously withdrawn from his Robinhood account.

“I’m in tremendous mental stress right now because this is all of my savings,” he said.

Mark Arena, CEO of Intel 471, noted that it’s a common occurrence that online accounts of monetary value are bought, sold and traded by cyber-criminals. He added that the Robinhood situation illustrates the importance of people practicing common information-security habits, such as not re-using the same password across multiple accounts and enabling two-factor authentication.