April Fools Sees Fake Extra Millions For Users of Brokerage Site 280
Upstart online brokerage site Zecco had an unfortunate April Fool's day snafu that they are claiming was an honest mistake. Users logged on to find larger balances than they should have, sometimes millions of dollars extra, and many of those users started trading with the nonexistent money. Happy April Fool's Day. "... when Zecco realized it, the company apparently started to force sell, even at a loss, charging the losses to the customers along with a '$19.99 broker-assisted trading fee.' Oops."
Re:Once again... (Score:2, Insightful)
Hmm, sounds like someone may be going out of business shortly.
Re:First of all... (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, when you have a brokerage account and are trading stocks, you should know what you are doing and be responsible for your actions. So, when you see several million in you account, you should know as much to not start investing them.
Unless of course you see the date, think that it is a joke and start bidding with it to go along with the prank. If you go with the company "it was a mistake, sorry.", you can't blame the costumers for going along and pretend they had that money.
Why We Don't Need Paperless Statements... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not an April Fools Prank (Score:3, Insightful)
Nonsense. Mistakes can happen on the other 364 days, but on April 1st they are all purposeful pranks!
Call me an optimist but... (Score:5, Insightful)
...people aren't that stupid.
More likely many of them realized "Hey, this could be an aprils fool or then not. I don't know. I could check it and get confirmation oooor.... I could act as if it wasn't and sue the hell out of them if this is!"
While nobody should be stupid enough to fall into that joke for too long, no organization should be stupid enough to make jokes with large sums of money.
Re:I smell a huge lawsuit (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I smell a huge lawsuit (Score:5, Insightful)
You log in your account and find a huge sum of money in their. Or, I hit the jackpot you think. Now you go and start using it for trade. TFA is a bit lightly on the details, but looks like this trades were go, meaning basically, market fraud.
I think filing a lawsuit would be overwhelmingly stupid, because anyone who opens their account and sees the balance off by a million dollars should reasonably know that there's been a mistake. If a jury agrees, then you've got a case of fraud. File the lawsuit and the SEC will come down on you hard for 10b violations.
Re:Why We Don't Need Paperless Statements... (Score:4, Insightful)
And how exactly does that help if there's a computer error? In the process of "generate document, print it, mail it to you", replacing the last two steps with "email it to you" has no effect on that crucial step one.
Re:Call me an optimist but... (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd prefer to think Option C.
If a person had $10k in the account, and it's suddenly $1m, spend it. Even if they have to resell tomorrow, maybe (just maybe) they'll turn a quick profit. so, you only get 1$ on that $1m, now you've just doubled your real starting capital.
The big boys play this game all the time. They play with imaginary money, to make real money. It just burns them sometimes too.
Re:Generally speaking... (Score:5, Insightful)
Unless you thought that ridiculously large amount of money was a prank and you didn't think you could actually spend it.
Re:Why We Don't Need Paperless Statements... (Score:3, Insightful)
No financial institution that I am aware of actually emails you the paperless document. They email you a link or notification to log in and view it online with the option to download a copy. It is difficult to automate the log in and download process based on receipt of an email, probably beyond the ability of 99.999% of their customers. That means that there is plenty of opportunity for manipulation of the "paperless document" on their servers at least until the user actually saves a copy and I'll bet you that most users don't save copies - they view them and then rely on them being available online indefinitely.
Re:Why We Don't Need Paperless Statements... (Score:5, Insightful)
Screw ups like this are why I never, ever spend money someone else (the bank, the brokerage, etc) tell me I have unless I can verify through my own records that I actually have that money.
Despite what Monopoly may have taught you, there is NEVER a bank error in your favor. If a financial institution screws up in a way that benefits you, you can GUARANTEE they will eventually find it and fix it, and if you've tried to take advantage of the situation in the meantime you're going to get hosed.
Re:NO sympathy for the "victims" (Score:1, Insightful)
If a large amount of money shows up in your bank account, and you have no idea how it got there, spending it WILL land you in jail if you withdraw the money and hide it or blow it.
Perhaps in the USA. In other countries there is legislation that puts this responsibilty in the banks or senders hands. You might even be entitled to a 10% finders fee if you choose to do the honest thing and alert the bank about it/give the money back.
Re:Anything to do with (Score:5, Insightful)
Poorly done April Fools joke.
Come on. Anyone with half a brain could figure out that no financial company would do something like that just for a "joke". Their liability for lawsuits and shit would be so obvious that they wouldn't even dream of doing that.
However, it would be more likely that it could have been an April Fools' joke of some idiot employee thinking it was funny to do such a thing without company approval. And according to their press release, likely was thrown out the door.
From their press release...
On April 1, 2009, one of our vendors provided Zecco Trading with an incorrect data feed which caused some customers to see erroneously high buying power.
[...]
Additionally, we want to make it clear that contrary to some reports, this was not in any way intentional and was not an April Fool's joke.
Re:What language should we use for our site? Perl (Score:3, Insightful)
A friend just found a bug in his (production) Java code, despite strict typing:
if(condition); //Code that always happens due to bug
{
}
Strict vs. loose typing has little effect on code quality. Testing+QA is how you avoid mistakes, not strict typing.
Strict typing only removes a small class of runtime errors. Which are then reintroduced due to strict typing (and compilation) being such a pain that most projects use loosely typed XML config files for an awful lot of "programming". Doh.
Re:Responsibility..... (Score:5, Insightful)
I think a car analogy is due.
Zecco made the error. Zecco eats the consequences. Period. Why should people be held liable for someone else's mistakes?
So you drive into work, and manage somehow to park your car in the wrong spont, belonging to and reserved for a neighboring business. Upon leaving the office to head home, you discover the mistake, and find the parking spots owner has stripped it down to the frame and sold all the parts on craigslist.
Explain why you should eat these consequences.
If maybe your neighbor had called a tow truck and had the vehicle impounded, sure I could see you having to eat that.
But I'm not following why you should have to eat your neighbors blatant theft of something he knew wasn't his. Just because you put the car in his spot is not a valid reason for him to think its now his car. Similarly, if the bank makes a mistake in your favor with your account, its not valid to assume the money is yours. The bank should eat all the costs of fixing their mistake, but if you attempt to try and keep or use the money that isn't yours, you become liable for that. Their is lots of supporting precedence for this too.
Re:I see the problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Try this:
* You are a Zecco customer with $20,000 in your account
* On APRIL FOOLS day you log in and see that you now have $1,020,000 in your account
* Your heart is filled with humor. "I get the joke!" you say.
* You start making joke trades with your joke fortune
* Zecco executes the trades, then reverts the trades at your expense
* You are angry and feel cheated
Re:Call me an optimist but... (Score:4, Insightful)
And what happens when you're forced to resell at a loss?
Just because my credit card company keeps increasing my limit doesn't mean I go and throw it all on the markets straight away. Note, this glitch was only on the available balance, not on the account assets. All this was was an error on the amount allowed to be borrowed... if there's anything the recent recession has taught us, it's that just because someone wants to loan us the money doesn't mean we should take it.
Or am I missing something?
Re:Call me an optimist but... (Score:3, Insightful)
Point regarding real-name masking taken. In this case, missed by a mile, though. The site has tools and features that I take advantage of and AC posts render them useless. I like reading posts and journal entries written by those I believe have shown humor or intelligence.
Fair enough?
Re:What language should we use for our site? Perl (Score:2, Insightful)
Sure, static typing isn't magic : it won't find every bugs in your programs...
But assessing that it has absolutely no positive effect and that you need ugly frameworks full of XML to compensate for the lack of dynamism only shows that you never tried a strongly statically typed modern functional language like Haskell.
The world isn't black and white, just because static typing isn't the panacea doesn't mean we should all use dynamic language and test every single function to see how it (mis)behave under conditions that couldn't ever happen in a decently typed language. Besides the suggested Haskell isn't only statically typed, it is also a purely functional language, which means a completely different paradigm than Java or Perl (both fairly imperative) often credited of reducing implementation error and facilitating tests.
--
Jedai (not Anonymous)
Re:What language should we use for our site? Perl (Score:2, Insightful)
Haskell's typing language is Turing Complete. It is extremely expressive and easy to use. It does a lot more than "remove a small class of runtime errors". It is a tool in itself.
Re:Call me an optimist but... (Score:4, Insightful)
The big boys play this game all the time. They play with imaginary money, to make real money. It just burns them sometimes too.
In the case of the "big boys", they were able to privatize the profits and socialize the costs to their hearts content after they had the Glass-Stiegel act pulled. They profited enormously off of trading imaginary money for tangible wealth, and burned us.