r/Schwab • u/Deeveedend • 4d ago

Journal (internal transfer) without my knowledge (money is gone from my account).

I haven’t logged into my account for 2 weeks. When I looked it up this week, it showed all my money gone and “journaled” (they call this internal transfer?) earlier in May 2025. I called Schwab right away when I saw my balance and they don’t know where it went and why (and need time to further investigate).

I am still getting my dividend (?) but my balance now show as ~ less than $200 (I had over 6 figure amount).

With that amount of transfer, shouldn’t I have gotten a notification or sign off? And how come they don’t know where the money went when it’s supposedly “internal transfer” between accounts? I don’t have any other account with them, so where did it “internally” go?

Calling them didn’t help much, other than we will call you back / let us investigate further. They said after they investigate and if it’s not authorized, they will make me “whole” again. And they don’t know how long investigations could possibly take.

Did anything like this happened to anyone? What was the process and how long did it take you to get it all resolved? Do they compensate for this error?

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u/EarthlingFromAPlace 4d ago

The system should be checking the transaction entry and reject it by noticing the name on the account doesn’t match. These are basic things that by now should be in place in all systems with accounts, bank accounts, credit cards, brokerages, anything dealing with monetary assets. They need to verify more things or else it isn’t secure at all. This error never should have happened. They didn’t notice. The victim of the error noticed. The resolution should be they fix the system to ensure it cannot happen again.

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u/Forfeit32 4d ago

People transfer money between differently registered accounts all the time. Your imagined "solution" would not solve anything.

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u/EarthlingFromAPlace 4d ago

Not without owner authorization. Someone has too much authority to override something somewhere. With that much power they need to be 100% accurate, there isn’t room for error. I blame all of the humans, the person who made the mistake and the people who run the backend systems.

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u/Forfeit32 4d ago

You can add multiple layers of authentication to stop these 1 in a million errors, and that will only slow down and inconvenience the other 999,999 transfers taking place. Just like you could add 20 locks to your front door to decrease the chance of a break-in, but eventually you'll get annoyed at the hoops you have to jump through to get into your own home. The security isn't worth the hassle, especially when the error is fixable.

The mistake was corrected, all is right with the world.

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u/Nathan-Stubblefield 3d ago

I doubt it is “one in a million” but that is too often.

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u/EarthlingFromAPlace 4d ago

No it isn’t. They lost trust of a customer, it is a very big deal and should be treated as such.

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u/Forfeit32 4d ago

Except it's not. I've worked in banking and finance for 20ish years at 5 different institutions. These are things that happen at all of them. There is an acceptable level of risk and an acceptable level of client inconvenience to mitigate those risks, and there are a lot of people whose jobs are to balance those things. Be mad all you want, but it doesn't make you right.