ING Direct Financial and Sharebuilder Stock Trading: The Two Merge to Create Financial Disaster for Customers

About a month ago I signed up for the new investment accounts offered by ING direct along with Sharebuilder. This is now a different company because of the merger and so every aspect of the business is run by ING Direct and I have had good dealing with Sharebulder in the past so I figured that I would give this service a try when I needed to invest in some stocks for a project that I was doing for one of my graduate courses.

So I headed to the site and signed up, I got some Continental miles for signing up which I thought was a great thing but when I started to use the site I did not enjoy it at all. I wanted to find a list of very inexpensive stocks that I could invest in and there was no option for searching on a free account. I got a message saying that I had to upgrade to a paid account if I wanted to use this feature. So, I decided that I would look my stocks up on Yahoo and search for things that others thought would perform well. I then looked for companies that I
knew which had very inexpensive stocks and found some for .5. I clicked on the stock name and then I was asked to type in my banking information which I did.

I then clicked trade and it asked me to upgrade to a premium account. It said that I would need to pay $50 commission if I wanted to trade on the site. I was not willing to pay that and the front page says that they charge $4 so I called a friend and asked for help making the trade. She came over and helped me so that I could get the stock traded and it asked for me to determine which week I would like the stocks to be purchased. I choose the date which was three days away and then clicked confirm. Since then I have been looking at my stock every day and monitoring the progress because it was for my project.

The stock went up to 1.25 last week and so I decided to go on the site and see how much profit I had made. Well, when I logged on I discovered that the people at ING did not actually buy the stocks for me ever and so I did not own them. I had no profit and the money that they took out of my account they put into a money market account without every asking me or confirming with me at any point. I read through the terms of the investment and it turns out that I now much keep the money in there for one year or they will take 20% of it as a fee for early withdrawal. I am now considering contacting the BBB because of the fact that they took action without my approval. I will never use this site again and my project is ruined.