I just closed my etrade account. I signed up and then left for London. Upon returing I stuck several thousands of dollars into account. I have nothing good about the company. I spoke with two reps about the matter. One rep agreed with me but someone above him did not. Another rep today was pleasant enough but failed to see my point so I am walking with my cash and taking my business elsewhere. I feel that anyone should take heed of this company and their poor management and marketing decisions. Maybe the reason their stock is being rated poorily. Below is theemail request I sent today.
Please contact me regarding closing of my account due to your response to my request to receive the 100 free trades which was the only reason I signed up for etarde. I am more then happy to take my family money elsewhere. I transferred money in yesterday but transferred it out today and would like the initial deposit that is lost in your system of restrictions since the 18th transferred back. I really wanted to use etrade. The decision to not allow me use of the promotion was a poor decision whoever made that choice. I could have easily had my wife sign up and get the etrade promotion but instead of making it easy for everyone and developing a good relationship we now have nothing good to say about your company in a time where your company could use good word of mouth and reviews instead of the negative rating that some analysts have reported. I reguested to speak to a manager and telephone operator Johnny Yoo said none was available.

Can you give negative stars? Same problem as everyone else...ETRADE does not bother to contact you to let you know anything regarding your account. Decent rates with terrible service. Do yourself a favor and don't bother wasting your time on this company.

I think all of these banks that offer online complete savings accounts, cds, IRAs, mutual funds, etc.... are good and convenience as long as you know how to manage and be aware of what you need to know about their polices and procedures. If people don't know how to manage their money they're always gonna have complains and issues. People like this maybe can't handle this type of financial service. They should stick with traditional banks.... so they would be happy to complain effortlessly with branch manangers.

Etrade deserves a negative star for how incompetent they are. I just closed my account after 4 months. They took two months just to get my wife added to the account. Customer service is the worst. They had me fax in her info twice and did not bother to call back. Said I didn't send it. Finally got someone who amazingly found it!!! Then when she logged in, one of these new security questions which is done by a third party service asked her where her ex-husband lived!!! Now how unethical is that. I called and they said that it is not their problem. YES IT IS! You have my money, you respect me by not asking my wife such questions. OH, and because she did not know the answer, it blocked her. So I had to call to get her switched back on which only took 50 minutes!!!! Not a week after that, I looked at my account balance in my savings (5.05%apy) and $1000 was missing!!!! Plus, my two transfers were stopped! I called and got a run-around for three days. Finally they admitted they messed up and put the money back in. Didn't offer anything but a shallow apology. I don't know what is going on up there but I am not standing around to see. I have closed both my and my parents accounts with them and moved to another provider. Everyone beware of Etrade.

etrade is an incompetent bank, they restricted my account with $27,000 for no apparent reason, and that was without even notifying me. Likewise they neglected to sort the mess out by them selves, so I had to battle them in an effort to get my money transfered to a decent bank. Leason to be learned: Never use etrade

RE: ETrade.ca

Customer service is as far as I got. They screwed up my application twice and only found out because I had to call and ask why the delay. If you have another option don't use etrade.ca

The most hedious service ever. Stay clear. I lost money from their incompetence

Do NOT use E*Trade. I, too, have been screwed by them. Their security is non-existant. Just two months after opening my account, someone fraudulently accessed it and took my money right out of my account. I immediately alerted E*Trade. Their response? They gave me the name and phone number of the person who stole my money and told ME to call them and get my money back!

I have begged them repeatedly to give me a new account number, look into this fraudulent activity and put safety restrictions on my account. It's like talking to a wall. No one will do anything. And they refuse to let me speak to a supervisor.

I will be tranferring my stocks out of E*Trade immediately and closing this account. What a waste of time and money. Don't make the mistake I did.

wow this is funny...
got my etrade account over a year ago....
they took my money out of my bank account and never activated my account.
they would never activate the account... nor would they return the money to the account it was withdrawn from....
every time i called they would say i need to send noterized certified letters to them to get the account money back...
40 hours of time wasted and I still dont have my money
SCAMMMMMERSSS!

DO NOT USE THIS COMPANY. Their advertising suggests all you pay is a small fee to buy a stock, and a small fee to sell. This is what I believed... I invested $1,000 a few years back, and they have stolen TWO HUNDRED AND THIRTY SEVEN dollars of this investment, for "maintenance fees." It is shocking and disgusting, and obviously if I had known about these fees I would never have used this company. You're better off putting your money in a lame savings account - or under your mattress - than using this rip-off company.

I cannot get my money out of etrade. They have repeatedly lied to me about sending a check to close out the balance. They have a bunch of idiots working there with morons for supervisors and imbiciles running the company.

I am trying to transfer my Simple IRA out of E*Trade and close my account. My financial consultant and I have now had around 10 phone calls with them, and around 10 email exchanges. At this point they have closed my website access but are still holding some of my funds and money, and the deal still is not done. Every time I call or email I get a different story, and my financial consultant got hung up on after a 45 minute hold. Avoid E*Trade at all costs.

Etrade has by far one of the WORST customer service centers that I've personally had the chance to experience. This is my first time actually rating ANY company, however, I feel obligated to warn potential clients so STAY AWAY....0/5 star plus a lemon on the side...

Etrade Sucks

I made the mistake of opening and account with Etrade and after 20 requests to get a debit card from and countless phone calls I gave up on them. THey are the most incompetent bunch I have ever run into. Now it is virtually impossible to get my money back out of etrade and after three attempts to make a wire and transfer the money back to the bank from which it was so easy to send to them I am at a loss

No one will answer my questions and now will not even answer the phone if I put in my account info. My account balance is now 0 and the 3200 dollars is just gone

Etrade stole my money. Do not let this happen to you. Stay clear of these clowns. It is nothing more than a scam and what they are doing now is fraud.

when you hear the name Etrade run.

Bill Stanley

Etrade does not deserve one star unfortunately negative is not an option. WARNING! DO NOT USE ETRADE. They're customer service is a joke. I wrote a rather large check to the state of Arkansas for sales tax on an automobile. I saw an insufficient funds charge on my account which was unusual considering there was at well more than enough to cover the check. In fact the bank statement from Etrade proves this. They agreed to refund the charge and said nothing was wrong with the transaction. A very short time after this they quietly put the charge back on which I did not notice for awhile. Weeks later I get a letter from the State threatening to prosecute me over a HOT check. The money left my account yet the state of Arkansas was refused payment because of insufficient funds. Etrade refused to reimburse me for this even though everything points to them including the state with my check stamped insufficient funds. I have already had to pay my attorney $150 to keep me from being prosecuted by the state of Arkansas who would not believe a word I said until I hired an attorney. Now I'm still paying the attorney in hopes off getting my money back from Etrade.

The people at Etrade seem to enjoy telling me how they WILL NOT reimburse me because it's not their fault. Is not not their fault they denied payment for insufficient funds when the statements shows there was plenty of money in the account? Is it not their fault that after they denied payment that exact amount of money left my account and they will not even try to find out where it went? Also to add insult to injury they charged me another $25 for stop payment on the check they say cleared with no problems. They not only refuse to return my money back to my account but they REFUSE to refund these ridiculous charges. I'm confident that if I hadn't taken the money out more erroneous charges would have eventually popped up.

This is real and as far as I am concerned they are criminals. If you are using Etrade get out while you can! It is so frustrating because the people at Etrade actually enjoy this. They will do it to you too if you give it enough time.

Not only is ETrade a crappy brokerage -- they are even worse when you try to leave them. After they froze my account because I moved to Canada I transferred the assets to Fidelity. It took about a month, but with Fidelity's help we got it all resolved. Well that was back in September of 2006. Now they have started sending me bill saying I have a negative balance. Apparently the $60 service fee I paid them for transferring my assets wasn't enough -- they decided that they wanted more. What a miserable greedy company. They are impossible to work with and when you try to get away from them they hound for more money.

There are a number of comments on the platform, so I won't add to this. However, their Customer Service is the most appalling I've ever experienced. They 'lost' a 6 figure dollar amount for 3 weeks in transfer, then took over 3 weeks to change an individual account to a joing account, and finally prevented me placing a stop loss order (or any order for that matter) for a compliance issue which they had already resolved, and placed me at risk of losing a significant amount. I will be moving as quickly as I can to a platform that actually has customer service. (Note that at the time of writing, the e*trade website is actually also down!)

Company from Hell. Applied for Roth IRA by Mail (they can't do it online since I'm a non-citizen), they typed my SSN wrong, and the procedure to fix my SSN is a pain. Moved to Fidelity, got everything I wanted *ONLINE* (that's include applying for Roth IRA) and been happy since then.

Terrible company. Screwed me on an options trade by past posting a supposedly real-time quote costing me thousands....then...they Allowed my personal account
to be hacked in to and then would not cooperate with me or the police in telling
me what specific personal information was violated. Rude people in their "customer service"
and especially Tim Olman in the security dept. Terrible company in all
ways avoid at all costs.

Terrible.

I'm a long time customer of what is now E-trade. I went through DLJ Direct, CFSB Direst, and Harris. I avoided them at all cost in the mid 90's because of bad reviews... Can anyone recommend a decent service to switch to? Ditching Marketspeed is enough for me to find another broker. That software was wonderful. I plan to do alot of trading over the next few months and need a reliable, fast service that offers Level II streaming quote info. Thanks.

Dave

An update: They screwed up my drip again for the FOURTH month in a row.  Really, is there no one to report them to and is there no recourse?  How STUPID can Etrade be?!

I transferred all of my assets (about $100K total) to another broker and paid the piper the usual fees, globally there is a $60 Transfer of Assets fee. However after several months there was about $25 that they just would not or could not transfer. After multiple attempts to get this resolved Etrade finally transferred the remaining $25 balance, but then charged $60 .. again. The difference they subtracted from my new brokerage account, meaning their mistake in not transferring all of my assets actually cost me another $35. Multiple phone calls to the customer "service" line utterly failed to get this resolved. What a terrible excuse for a broker, I will never ever let myself or any of my family members use them again.

I wish there was an option of 0 star because I don't think ETrade even deserves a 1 star. I've been their customer for a few years and their website is often slow and interface has always been overly complex. It also has the most bugs, more than any other major websites I've used. It seems every time I make a change, my account would have problems. It's amazing to me how their quality has stayed this bad and never improved over the years. Also their maintenance fees are much higher than other online brokerage. I'm finally fed up with them and I just closed my account.

I was sold to etrade via Harris Direct, Harris promised there would be no change in service. Boy were they wrong. I don,t think I ever had to
call Harris for help in doing things I wanted to do. HARRIS DIRECT
DONALDSON LUFKIN JENRETTE and some other name, that is how long I was there! From day one at etrade the bottom fell out. I moved my big acct
out, left the small one for 0ptions and stuff. But it just keep getting
worse. I was a trader making money everyday. Ive been in the hole since. They took our trading platform called MARKET SPEED a thing of beauty, canned it and gave us Tons of ridicolous clutter with names like
ETRADE PRO AND STUFF. HARRIS people begged LET US KEEP MARKETSPEED.
They told me it would cost them money to blend it in. No concern
for the money of customers. And tax time, they say etrade works directly with turbotax, just import into schedule D, done. They dont
tell you it only does sells and not cost basis. So you're a trader, you're screwed . Then they sell you a $150 subscription to GAINSKEEPER
TO TRACK something already in their system, and you'er screwed again
IT'S JUNK!

Etrade does not even deserve one star. Imagine the worst customer service in the world. Etrade are a thousand times worse than that. They have STOLEN nearly 3 grand of my money. AVOID THEM LIKE THE HIV VIRUS!

Poor customer service, high service fees. I have been trying to close my account for weeks, with hours of phone calls and emails. I comply with their requirements, only to find out from the next person that they require something different. After 3 traders, and approximately 7 financial service reps I still do not have a closed account and am upcoming on new quarterly fees for not trading. The customer service staff is friendly and nice, but I would not recommend Etrade.

Very slow money transfer. Money gets returned couple days later for ridiculous reasons. You will lose interest when that happens. I believe they are trying to steal your interest.
Very bad service - put you on hold for long time, don't give you the answer you need.
I will never do business with etrade.

Stay away from these etrade crooks! I called etrade to buy a CD. The customer service representative convinced me to open up a savings account while I wait for my $10,000 in funds to transfer into my brokerage account from my external bank account to buy the CD. So because of their high interest rates I allow him to open one up for me and have my existing $6000 transferred from my existing brokerage account to the new savings account. He informs me this should automatically transfer to my savings account once opened. Days later, I see NO available cash in my brokerage account, and NO money in my savings account. I call, and call, and call only getting different customer representatives promising to get to the bottom of this. They promise to call me back and they don't. They put me on hold, transfer me to someone else, etc. It has been 7 days and still I haven't been able to get my $6000 back. One representative admits to seeing the $6000 withdrawn, and when I asked why I can't see the transaction on my history list, she tells me it's because it was "done in the backrooms and those transactions don't get listed". Pretty shady if you ask me. She told me she was posting my money back yesterday to my savings account +interest and I should have seen it today. I didn't. Called her back again. She told me today it would post to my account in 2 business days. We'll see.

She also told me my $10,000 has already been received. It just hasn't posted due to their "holding period". Somehow I think they're trying to run away with some more of my money. Just be careful with these guys. Even just transferring your money with these people they'll find a way to steal it. And here I am having to fight everyday to get my own money back which they've stolen because I let some representative make commission off me by opening up a savings account and "transferring" my money.

Just put my son's $9000 in an etrade custodial account and am very concerned that the money has not been placed in savings as requested. It's only been 4 days, but after some initial problems and time spent with their customer service, I'm already seeing the frightening portrait that is depicted in the other reviews. So what does anyone have any advice on getting the money back in full?

E*Trade doesn't deserve even one star! They change the fees often. I trade microcrap stocks and there is like a .015 cent charge per share in addition to their $12.95 trade commission. 10,000 shares cost $150 or so to trade. Just switched to TD Ameritrade, hope they are better, couldn't be worse.

Etrade Sucks for sure. ZERO Stars!!!
Without notice to me they sold my stocks worth about $600.00.
I know it's not much but they should have sent me an official letter or an email to my regular email address notifying me that I had owed money for their stinking service fee.
Can't anyone just buy some stocks and not watch them for a few years hoping someday they just might make a profit!!!

Etrade deserves freaking zero stars. They are terrible. Without warning they held my $7000 for 3 plus weeks while I lost thousands of dollars. Do not use Etrade, Ameritrade is much better.

worst ever!

Suggest they change their name to F-Trade since its the grade they deserve. One day my brokerage account didnt appear when I logged on. Was told they had to restrict access for 5 days to allow a recent electronic funds transfer to clear. Thats a lot of crap. The reason for electronic transfers is to reduce the clearing process to 24 hours or less. I waited 5 days, and still couldnt access my account. Sent a blizzard of emails and made several calls. Lots of promises, but was never able to access my account. Finally had to transfer the entire account to a real brokerage firm. Do yourself a favor. Instead of sending your money to Etrade just flush it down the toilet. Its quicker, cheaper, easier and you have a much better chance of seeing it again.

I've been trading and investing for over 30 years. Was forced to E-Trade with their purchase of BrownCo. Absolutely, without a doubt, the worst broker I have ever been associated with, and that includes a long list. Their efforts at "high tech" platforms are a joke. They don't work half the time, and the other half force trading errors with various confusing messages regarding connectivity. Don't go near them if you have a choice.

Changed the terms of service without properly contacting and informing account holder of these changes. Terrible.

ETrade is aweful. Their customer service sucks. I have tried to open an account twice, only to be told that because of the "Patriot Act" that I need to send in extensive verification. Screw E*Trade, go with ScottTrade, they are much better and won't put you through hell just to access your funds.

Don't put your money in E*Trade! Let me tell you my story:

I'm 52 years old. A U.S. citizen. A three weeks ago, I moved from Seattle to Houston. Then I opened up an E*Trade account and transferred $2,000 into that account from my bank hoping to make a modest investment. OK, I'm not a rich, fat capitalist, and that money represents a good chunk of my life's savings. I'm still recovering from the "dot-bomb" failure of Tech Companies, one of which laid me off, in the early 90s.

So here's what happened: E*Trade, ran an Equifax check on my address and found that Equifax still believes I'm in Seattle, and just because of that, E*Trade SEIZED MY FUNDS and locked me out of my account! Then they had the audacity to blame it on the "Patriot Act."

And how did I find out that my money had vanished from my account? I found out when I tried to log in and couldn't! No email, no phone call, no notification of any kind was sent to me.

E*Trade then insisted I send them a copy of my Texas driver's license showing the address that I gave them in Houston. I haven't even been resident here for a month!

I'm a commercial pilot, so I sent them a copy of my certificate verification from the U.S. Department of Transportation that shows my new address, and I reminded them that the FAA is just a little more picky about who they let fly airplanes (in light of 9/11) then the Depratment of Motor Vehicles is about who can drive cars. The FAA does background checks and citizenship verification -- a good chunk of the illegal immigrants in the U.S. have a driver's license.

So here I sit, with my money flushed down a black hole, while E*Trade ponders whether to give it back to me. According to them, it could take quite some time before I see my money, derived from my legal wages and for which I paid taxes, returned to me.

CAVEAT EMPTOR!!!!

Like others, I was also a very satisfied customer of HarrisDirect who got shuffled off to ETrade. I've tried to give the organization the benefit of the doubt - buyouts and mergers don't always go smoothly. But their service continues to disappoint me. Each month I seem to get nickel and dimed for some small item: margin interest expense they can't explain and now a "mandatory $20 fee" because one of my stocks was part of a merger. The worse for me, though, is their failure to notify that the fees are coming. Since they don't offer competitive interest rate in their sweep accounts, I move excess cash back and forth from Vanguard. Then, when I get hit by a fee, I get overdrawn and -yep you can guess it - more fees. When Ive asked why we arent notified upfront they tell me it is not their policy and refer me to their investment agreement. Ive learned my lesson; from now on I will be reading all investment agreements even if they are 20 or more pages long.

Closing an account, getting your money from Etrade is a total nightmare. It's worse that terrible. I will discourage all I know fom ever joining etrade.

If you are a Brownco customer converted to Etrade you might consider Scottrade, low priced and no fees or if you trade options Tradeking is the new kid on the block, inexpensive and responsive.

I had been an E-trade customer for 11 years until today. They enticed me to stay in October 2003 when I had wanted to leave by promising "permanent Power E-trade status. Unfortunately, as I am told by E-trade, permanent isn't really permanent. Turns out that you must call in every quarter and wait an hour or more to speak to someone to get the service restarted. In my conversation with a customer service supervisor on April 4, I was told that if I didn't want to call in every quarter they could make me a "street customer again."

Over the past month, I have been slowly liquidating the account and transferring the cash to another brokerage and they were making a transfer of the actual securities difficult. On April 25, I wrote a check to my bank for $17000 from my E-trade brokerage account. On April 28, they returned a check to my bank saying that my account was closed. Since this was a $17000 check, it was no small matter. E-trade cannot explain why they returned the check. They said the account is active and in good standing and that the funds are good. Of course, that does me no good with a negative bank balance and NSF fees.

I just got off the phone with E-trade customer service to close the account. After 11 years, I am treated rudely and without any respect at all.

This company is NOTHING like it was in 1995 when I opened my account.

I bought 150 shares of a single stock in 2004. In the two years since, ETRADE has charged me $195 in maintenance fees. Sometime in the last year, it turns out, they changed their small print to say that any accounts with a balance of less than $10,000 would be charged a $40 fee just for existing (though I can't see how an electronic record is costing them so much money to maintain). It's ridiculous. Go elsewhere unless you want your money to just disappear into a black hole.

Additional comments: Friday, April 14, 2006 I did eventually receive my money and close my account, so I thought. Incredibly, despite having mailed in the "Close account" form and arguing with them over this on the phone, and having taken out my money - I just received a statement showing a balance of... $0.28! That's right, 28 whole cents. And now I'm nervous that if I don't do something, they'll start charging me fees, and when the account goes negative, they'll report it against my credit, OR if I try to get them to close it, they'll want to charge me the fees to have a check cut and sent to you all over again. Really, what the heck is their problem? So, yeah, I guess I'm going to be filling out the SEC complaint form that's been posted here, and sending a letter with return receipt requested to E-trade. It's just insane that this is such a nightmare. Original comments below, from Jan. 31, 2006 It's too bad there's not a "0 stars" rating. ETRADE is awful. 1. I set up a rollover IRA a few years ago, when it was advertised as "no fees". Within a year they were charging me quarterly/annual fees for "account maintenance". 2. I wanted to transfer my IRA to my companies 401k. After 45minutes on hold earlier this month, I gave up and just found the form online myself. When I received the check today, it was about 10% of my account (my form very specifically said "send entire distribution, and close the account") After 53 minutes on hold today, I got through to a "customer service" (sic) person. She determined that since my last trade was on Jan. 19th, and the request to close the account came on the same day - the funds weren't available (takes three days for trades to clear). Nowhere on the "close account" form was this mentioned. Surely I am not the first person to want to both liquidate stocks AND close out the account. What I can't understand is given that I had sold all of my stocks, and that before that 3-day period was over they received a notice from me to close the account - why did they not simply wait for the stocks to clear and then honor my request? I mean, really, we're talking about waiting an extra day or so to do what I asked them to. Instead, they did something completely different than what I asked - and they CHARGED ME FOR IT. So now to get my IRA money I'm stuck paying: - $25 *2 = $25 for each check they wrote, which is now 2 - $20 *2 = $20 for each fedex, so I can receive the checks - $25 annual account maintenance fee (on my "no fee IRA") = $115 to get MY OWN MONEY BACK I think it's utterly ridiculous, and will absolutely never do business with them again. I caution anyone thinking of opening an account with them to reconsider.

I can't begin to describe the consistency of poor service. E*Trade bank sucks. Never try their banking service. Their bill-payment is unreliable, and you have to wait 20 minutes to talk to anyone when you have to resolve the many mistakes they make.

I was a HarrisDirect customer, and I recently made an online IRA distribution to cover some checks I had to write for surprize expenses. The money never got transferred to my outside bank account, so after 6 days and several bounced checks, I logged in to my etrade.com account, and there was my distribution minus the taxes sitting in my "available cash" section of my account!! I called Etrade only to find out that according to them, the money WAS transferred to my bank account. So I had to convince the guy that, no, it's right there in my etrade account. Finally, after being put on hold while he "figured it out" he came back to tell me: "it looks like there was some sort of error" YA THINK!!?? Of course, he has no idea what happened, and this has never happened before, and so on. Well, 3 days later my bank account is severely overdrawn I'm hungry and scrounging for change to buy gas to get to work, and when I call, I am simply told "they are working on it feverishly, like 5 minites ago fast" he actually said that. Oh, but he'll be getting back to me Friday because he's off tomorrow. WTF!!!! They are crazy. As soon as this mess is straightened out, I am rolling over my IRA to another broker. How can they treat people this way and get away with it??!! Bastards.

By far the worst experience with ANY company. The CEO should be lynched in public.

The hold times were bad, but they are getting much better. I think they finally realize how much this hurt business. Also, the website is by far the best of any online broker, very user friendly and informative. Overall im happy.

It is just impossible to get any kind of response from eTrade on anything. It always takes forever to get a representative on the phone. I have called them up 3 times in the last week at different times and no matter when you call you always get the same stupid message about heavy call volume. Every time I hung up in frustration after waiting for about half an hour. I am going to take this up with my company as well, because they chose to have our options with eTrade.