Hey. Thank you for the feedback, it has been passed on. As per the correspondences that were sent out, weâre sorry about this and efforts are ongoing to help prevent this happening again. Please contact customer services at hello@freetrade.io whoâll be able to help with individual questions.
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as investors should we not apply our own due diligence to make sure as to what we can and can not hold within an ISA
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No, Freetrade are selling a product therefore they are the ones responsible.
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Yep Freetade have messed up with this one allowing you to buy in ISA. T212 did the same a year or so ago with some if not all of the Chinese Ev makers, it created a lot of anger amongst investors/traders in the forums at the time.
Just suck it up, nothing you can do about it. One of those things.
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Yes freetrade should ensure that the correct companies are listed in the ISA category. However you also should be doing your own due diligence before investing in a company. This should have included realising that the company was an ASR with privately held securities.
You should not be investing in companies without doing your research.
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So what would be your best case response from Freetrade?
I did my due diligence in the company. I didnât know I had to do due diligence on FT if itâs financially regulated and signed off to provide members of the public a stocks and shares ISA.
I donât care that another company like T212 did this a year ago. Just because one company did this doesnât make it okay for another to get away with it. This means the industry didnât learn a year ago. Itâs not good enough that FT or any company does this to people and we have our isa allowance taken away and have to deal with the consequences. FT and any other company found âmis-sellingâ should receive severe penalties for causing this mess. Customers should also be compensated.
I will write to the ombudsman and my MP about this as itâs not right. There should be more protections. An apology is definitely not enough.
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What do you want the punishment to be?
Companies will make mistakes as they are ran by humans. Thankfully for the most part they are limited in terms of their impact.
Freetrade do and hopefully will learn from this but itâs happened, there isnât much that can be done and Iâm assuming the T&Cs youâve accepted by using the platform cover them for errors and omissions.
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An apology is not good enough. What are you doing to compensate people like me. I have lost my isa allowance and do not want to sell or move this to a GIA. This is completely due to FTâs incompetence and itâs not right just to send customers a message in the app. FT completely messed up here and you owe us our ISA allowance and the ability to keep profits without tax penalties as thatâs what you âsoldâ us.
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I think the members here get your frustration/annoyance at the situation, as seen in your posts, but weâre heading into a couple of bank holidays so itâs not going to get resolved until Monday onwards now.
Complaining about customer service (and others who did), itâs not their fault, nor is this sort of thing ever any particular persons fault.
Posting in the comments further isnât going to resolve the situation either, come back with a calm head and take it up over email next week.
Try and enjoy the long weekend @SarLondon111 
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My god. Youâve exploded more than Mt St Helens.
FT should have ideally never have allowed the issue⊠and what theyâre doing is keeping you with the law for both yourself, then, and the rest of us.
Not ideal, but maybe theyâre where not aware of the separate listing but your saying you have ÂŁ20k of this 1 company and that was your fulfilment for the year? 
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Freetrades and yours. You invested into a company you apparently didnât even realise was an ADR or privately held securities.
There is an element of dual blame. Yes freetrade screwed up, and so did you. It should have come up in your due diligence pretty quickly, so hopefully itâs lessons learnt from the mistake.
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Pursue what avenues you feel you need to mate but I will be very surprised if you get anything more off the Ombudsmen and MP than you have off FreetradeâŠif it helps you get it off your chest though go for it!
I donât think it is a fair expectation that a customer must know all the financial rules that qualify a stock to be held in an ISA - I expect my broker to handle that process. For me, that would fall outside normal due diligence when examining an investment.
That said, mistakes happen and no real harm has been done, and we have up to the 15 June 2022 to sell our position if we wish to do so.
It would be a good gesture if Freetrade offered to waive the FX fees if we wanted to sell the position in the ISA and keep the money there (retaining the tax exemption), and re-purchase the position in a GIA using newly added funds.
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I moved my gia stocks to my new isa, some were flagged up by FT as not eligible so i presumed the ones excepted were ok. BioNtech was even listed as ok for a isa on the FT list of stocks. Mistakes do happen but i donât understand why this wasnât automatically picked up. Investors could have lost money. I feel one Amazon share would be adequate compenstion for my distress 
@TradeRunner
Not always a good plan.
HMRC would come a knocking for the money theyâre owed.
Going back to the 90s, given made a change to what was allowed withing a pension, then realised it wasnât beneficial for them & it was quickly changed⊠Anyone who changed plans because of it where still caught on the hook for fees.
Thems the rubs
Pretty disappointed to see people passing any element of this blame to the user.
Itâs fair enough that mistakes happen, I wouldnât judge an organization for that the first time an issue occurs. Even despite this being a pretty foundational requirement of a platform it seems almost all the providers have messed up at one point.
If the same issue occurs again thatâs not a mistake, thatâs a structural failing that suggests RCAs and preventative measures are ineffective.
Itâs pretty concerning as an investor that we are expecting Freetrade to expand across Europe and presumably offer a variety of tax advantaged accounts, each with their own regulatory requirements and yet they donât seem to have a robust, scalable solution for even the first tax advantaged account they launched years ago.
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If a retailer sells food with a banned ingredient in it they couldnât blame the customer for not reading the label properly.
At a time of a screw up itâs important to see honesty and someone senior from 
owning the error. Then over correct in fixing it, refund ISA payments from when the ADR was incorrectly sold and offer the next 12 months for free as a gesture of good will. What do you think @Gemhappe?
The extent of any blame that should be attributed to a user would be not know you were investing in an synthetic listing as opposed directly in the company. While the frailties of US listed ADS/ADR has been highlighted by the Chinese tech crackdown it probably should have come up in research given its right at the top of the Oatly S1. Maybe Iâm the only daft sod who likes to read these.
sauce - Oatley S1 regulatory filing, required before a public listing
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1843586/000119312521121323/d123209df1.htm
All This talk of Oatley has me wanting some barista addition now
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You didnât.
Sorry but completely disagree with this, it is not my job to know whether the stock is eligible for an ISA or not, I am not a financial specialist or tax advisor, that is 100% the providersâs job! I would also be seeking some kind of compenstion in this personâs shoes. Not quite the same situation, but it took 10 weeks between my previous provider selling my shares and transferring them to Freetrade, i.e. 10 weeks of lost opportunity and time when my money wasnât invested, I can assure you I insisted on decent compensation for that.
Precisely, couldnât have expressed it better.
Fully agree, absolutely disgusting! Victim blaming at its finest.
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