My first disappointment with FT

Not sure whether chats with customer service have been discussed and I wouldn’t expect them to be as they have been so far outstanding.
I recently bought the iPad Pro to basically replace my obsolete MacBook Air (2015). Now I have a number of email accounts and I would have thought the same applies to many of us. I do have my primary account however, the one that i use 99% of the time. I also have a Yahoo account for trying to eliminate the floods of irrelevant newsletters I subscribed to over the years. It is with this Yahoo account I first registered for a GIA account - reason being I was only going to observe the platform as at the time it looked like it was going down a Robinhood type of platform. By the way my Yahoo account is also registered with all the reference agencies etc and nothing illegitimate about it. Also note that when I registered for the community website, it allowed me to register using my primary email account and thinking back to it I don’t know why I was allowed to even do that without a FT associated account. So when I opened up the new iPad of course I used my primary email address to set it up because the vast majority of my data is comes with my primary account. I downloaded the FT app as the iPad screen size was a contributing factor to me buying something that I can use with apps including the FT app. Without realising it the email address was auto-populated and without any prompts (at least not obvious enough for me to notice) the app created a new GIA under my primary email. As soon as a new account was created I realised that it was a whole new account without any of my stocks coming up. I immediately contacted FT and was assured that my preference of using my primary email account can be implemented by providing 2 ID docs which I did provide immediately. And today first thing in the morning a lady contacted me to effectively tell me that she was reviewing my accounts and started asking why did I do this and telling me that it is against T&Cs even though I was trying to relay to her that the account was created in errors an FT was notified immediately. She was insisting on still looking into it ignoring the fact that the account is one-day old with no activity whatsoever as well as the fact that i am a subscriber on Plus with increasing activity and about to submit my forms to transfer my ISA to FT. I have still not heard from her so I am assuming that she is investigating the possibility of me being a fraudster - in the meantime you just lost my ISA and support especially today when I was actually talking up the app to a bunch of fellow investors prior to her investigation. I don’t think I have ever given anything but 5-star reviews and positive comments to customer service staff but now it felt like it was time for your medicine. Very offended and disappointed today.

So, to recap:

Because of [reasons] you accidentally created a new account under a different email to the one you already have an account under. You informed FreeTrade. A FreeTrade representative contacted you today to confirm details and make sure you’re not a fraudster. Now because it’s not all been corrected the same day you’ve decided that you’re offended and have taken umbrage, and will flounce off to a competitor with your vast wealth and taking numerous possible investors (who also probably have vast wealth to invest) with you.

That about right?

Maybe you should stand back and realise that the checks that need to be made are to protect you. The only person to blame for this situation is you, not FreeTrade, so maybe you might want to remember that.

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Not 100% sure what FT have done wrong here, surely you want them to be very thorough when it comes to checking this sort of incident?

I’ve found the customer service team at FT to be amongst the best of all the providers. Have you ever tried one of the competitors, you’d be shocked at what they they call ‘service’

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Hey @NicolasK
These things take time. FT are legally required to do many of the things they do. Its to protect you and us and them. There are lots of nasty people in the world.

It will be resolved very quickly, but for security probably not instantly.

Chill bro, it’ll be fine.

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Paragraphs died here. 21st December 2020. RIP.

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If somebody asks to change email linked to my FT account hope it is not changed in two seconds

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I’m just surprised they didn’t ask you for a photo holding a post-it of today’s date (or something to that effect). If I were to be malicious, I could pretty easily transfer a friend/family member’s account into my own possession following the customer support steps you laid out.

Btw, sounds like support for you was fast and fine. If it really is against their TOS they could have started taking steps to block your accounts, but sounds like they were trying to help?

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Playing devils advocate and obviously not knowing the extent of the conversation I can see how you can be left frustrated if you are explaining your situation but the support team just ‘ignores’ you. I’ve had that on so many support calls where I for example tell them I’ve switched the wifi on and off and they go on to tell me to switch it on and off. In this instance if they made it very clear ‘you have broken our t&c’s therefore I have to follow the procedure and do background checks etc’ I think that’s the best way to deal with it (maybe that’s exactly what they did of course). At the end of the day it’s only FT that can lose here as the customer is always right so it’s worth them noting this to figure out how to keep the customer happy in this situation. Then again some customers are beyond saving of course


You should be thanking Freetrade a hundred times over that they didn’t just do as they were told when you clicked your fingers - believe me you would not want your life savings in the hands of a company like that.

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Don’t want to sound rude but if this post had a down vote button I would bet my money on this making it to the top of the list

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Wise words

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You have a point in that we should all try to remain constructive Nicolas and the comment you mention, was probably a little bit hostile. It may be a good idea to practise what you preach also though. Boasting of Freetrade losing your business through doing their job of protecting you, and then talking of it being ‘time for your medicine’ comes across as vindictive and unnecessarily petty though.

There were many other replies to your comment which you seem to have ignored. Maybe responding to some of these, that point out how Freetrade were actually looking after you would be a better use of time? I know you maybe didn’t have lots of money in the account, but you surely would want the same level of care being taken over identity regardless of whether you had a small or gigantic amount in your account? Also, Freetrade aren’t to know you are talking them up to friends, nor whether you were just about to transfer an ISA - and neither should make any difference to how they treat you as every customer should be treated with the same level of care.

I hope you may have changed your stance towards Freetrade rather than remaining ‘offended and disappointed’. I’m really not sure where you will find better service, and as has been mentioned above - be careful if you do find a company willing to sort out a problem like yours without doing any checks, etc
 as they really wouldn’t be worthy of trusting your money with.

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Not sure what your problem is here.

Unless you’re advocating for a situation where I could open an account as ‘Nicholas Kleovoulou’ using one of my burner emails, contact support saying I’ve ‘made a mistake’, and expect them to switch ‘my’ existing account to the new email address I’ve used, no questions asked?

Given that, why wouldn’t you want them making sure that you’re not a fraudster? They’re trying to protect you and your investments as much as anything else.

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I’m going to try and have a read but you’ve seriously got to consider putting some spacing between your paragraphs. Incredibly hard to read huge blocks of text.

Edit: Happy Christmas Everyone!

Ive been reading this thread from the beginning and found it quite interesting how people respond.

Forum members should have the ability to post positive comments as well as post comments which contain ‘constructive criticism’ but of course constructive criticism is a subjective term.

Nevertheless, we all have freedom of speech and we should not ‘gang up’ on others but challenge gently (which the majority of the posts do).

We are all on this forum to gain a little more knowledge and understanding of investing so we should at least all have that in common.

Also a reminder that there is flag button for offensive comments which can be used to highlight these to the moderators (not that I have ever used it).

Anyway that’s my two pence worth. Have a good holiday period eveyone and hope your in invesment journey is fruitful.

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Agreed. Everyone needs to have the freedom to raise their own disappointments. In my opinion it sounds as though now, the reason there is disappointment in freetrade here is somewhat down to how one person reached out completely independently of the customer service team and seems to have disagreed or at least confused things from what was originally set out from customer services?

The original post doesn’t seem to have made that very clear, at least to me, and only the latest post has cleared that up?

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Internet commenting according to me:

Sometimes people just need to vent, often over things that are unrelated to the actual topic being discussed, especially given the current climate.

Lots of nuance gets lots in 2 dimensional written communication.

It’s all too easy to take a binary position and become hyper defensive. See my post here for some life changing insight:

Let’s all be a bit more empathetic and kind - especially after the utterly bonkers stressful year everyone is having.

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Yeah, I can see why. That’s a general problem with the internet than just here I believe. You see it with banks with oddly written complaints (they’re fake), you see it here with people just coming to stir the pot, and I see it all the time on another forum with spam. Formatting, wording, etc. End up triggering that ‘what’s up with this’ bell in the back of your head which I expect is what a few people say here. That’s not to delegitimise your concern, just the way you wrote your post comes across odd :smile:

Completely agree your reply btw, we could all to with taking a second before replying :slight_smile:

I’m glad to see it was all sorted out, that’s good news.

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Alright - I wasn’t planning on checking this anymore but that funny little message came to me that my posting of a picture of my own posting alongside the reminder by the system of the community guidelines in response to @rohitys was flagged as inappropriate.

Plus I was given the chance to edit my post so it can be automatically visible again or whatever.

Well this is what I will do - I will say thank you to everyone. My original posting turned out to be very illuminating of the character of - what I am hoping - a small number of this website’s users.

Mr System - you can leave the comment as is. I am over and out.

And as I promised - thank you everyone. Your views and comments are very valuable to me.

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I don’t quite understand.

Why not delete the app and then re-install and login with your FT account?

I own my own domain so I usually register with something like “freetrade@mydomain.com”. I also sometimes do the same accidental thing of registering again with a primary email, but it’s trivial to wipe local data and login again.

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