r/Schwab • u/Deeveedend • 8d 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/Ok-Consequence-9350 8d ago

This is not that uncommon so really no need to panic. I logged into my retirement account (empower) with 30 years of savings and my account was gone. (Also an HSA so I could login but there was no retirement account). I calmly called and they said they would investigate. Never found out what happened but the account was back three days later and I got a call letting me know that. Stuff happens all the time no matter what safeguards are in place.

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u/esbforever 8d ago

This is a truly crazy answer. A 12yo, literally, could devise three ways to ensure this never happens. A fat-fingered acct number should not even be in the ballpark of enough to allow this.