speaking of leaked email addresses
i noticed last week that i was getting stock-related spam at the address that was only ever given to tdameritrade (when it was just ameritrade). fortunately it’s easy to shut down an address like this and shift to a new one. we’ll see how long that one lasts.
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I can also confirm that third parties have obtained an email address known only to me and ameritrade. It is possible that someone has servers close enough to ameritrade's data center and is filtering email addressed to ameritrade. It is also possible that someone within ameritrade is divulging this information for profit.
I am letting you all know that this is continuing as of today. Late last year, I began getting stock spam on all of the unique, known only to me and Ameritrade email addresses, so I immediately changed the addresses given to Ameritrade with new ones. Less than one week later, it began again. I changed the addresses again to something even harder to guess and wrote "not nice" emails to Ameritrade customer service letting them know that they "do not under any circumstances have my permission to share my contact information with anyone". This seemed to get their attention, and the emails were clean for about six months, when today, it started again at both addresses they have for me, the same day, from the same spammers. They either have security like a screen door in their data center, or a significant lack of business ethics. I'm done. My accounts will go elsewhere, never to return.
I have a similar experience. Several months ago I started getting penny stock spam to an email address I used with Ameritrade. I blamed them, but since I used that email address with my bank, I could not be sure. So I created a new address only to be used with them, and soon the stock spam started coming to that address. I sent them a nasty email about the breach in their security, and they replied "it's not our fault - it's probably due to devious spammers getting lucky with random email generators". I told them if that were true, then I should be getting ALL the randomly generated email because I have a catch-all account that receives mail (to my domain name) even if I don't have a specific address set up. But I don't; I only get stock spam to the address I gave to Ameritrade. So I tried again - I created three new email addresses called TD1, TD2, and *TD3. I gave one to Ameritrade, and the other two I used as control (i.e. I did not give them to anyone). And guess what? It took a few months, but I just started getting spam to the address I gave to Ameritrade, but no spam to the two control addresses.
TD Ameritrade has a security problem, and most likely it's an inside job.
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I can confirm that Ameritrade has been leaking e-mail addresses.
A friend and I both changed our unique ameritrade e-mail addresses this summer after we started getting spam. On November 11, we both started getting spam on the new unique Ameritrade e-mail address. I'm working on getting together a group of people who have had similar experiences. Please contact me if you'd like to be kept in the loop.