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The Almighty Buck The Courts

Robinhood Sued By Family of 20-Year-Old Trader Who Committed Suicide (cnbc.com) 192

Robinhood was sued Monday for wrongful death by the family of Alex Kearns, a 20-year-old customer who took his life last summer after believing he had racked up big losses on the millennial-favored stock trading app. CNBC reports: "This case centers on Robinhood's aggressive tactics and strategy to lure inexperienced and unsophisticated investors, including Alex, to take big risks with the lure of tantalizing profits," said the complaint filed by his parents Dan and Dorothy Kearns, and his sister Sydney Kearns in a California state court in Santa Clara. The family is based in Naperville, Illinois. Robinhood's "reckless conduct directly and proximately caused the death of one of its victims," the complaint said. The lawsuit is also accusing the brokerage of negligent infliction of emotional distress and unfair business practices.

Alex Kearns, a then-sophomore at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, committed suicide in June after thinking he had a negative $730,165 cash balance on Robinhood. The complaint alleges that Kearns misunderstood the Robinhood financial statement and was protecting his family from the financial obligation. The suit says that Kearns made three attempts to contact Robinhood customer service regarding the massive underwater balance. However, his messages were met with automated replies, according to the complaint.

In a note to his family that CNBC has seen, Kearns accused Robinhood of allowing him to pile on too much risk. He claimed the puts he bought and the shares sold "should have cancelled out," according to the note. "How was a 20 year old with no income able to get assigned almost a million dollars worth of leverage?" read the note Kearns wrote to his family. "There was no intention to be assigned this much and take this much risk, and I only thought that I was risking the money that I actually owned." A Robinhood spokesperson told CNBC, "We were devastated by Alex Kearns' death. Since June, we've made improvements to our options offering."

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Robinhood Sued By Family of 20-Year-Old Trader Who Committed Suicide

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  • A UI Error (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Actually, I do RTFA ( 1058596 ) on Tuesday February 09, 2021 @03:20AM (#61042948)

    FTFA:

    He claimed the puts he bought and the shares sold "should have cancelled out," according to the note. "How was a 20 year old with no income able to get assigned almost a million dollars worth of leverage?"

    He didn't. He had a well-hedged position. However, the notice of the margin call arrived on June 11, 2020 (a Thursday). Therefore, the option he sold was executed early (they normally execute automatically Saturday using the closing price on Friday). Maybe it was right at the bubble and they were worried a price move would render the option worthless the next day?

    The next day (Friday) he killed himself and the day after that (Saturday, when his other option auto-executed) RH sent him an email saying his account was back in the black.

    A few further tragic details. First, although it says he emailed several times, he did so Friday morning starting at 3:47 am when he got the notification he needed to deposit funds, and a twice more into the morning. He got a case number, and it's unreasonable to expect RH customer service to have 10 hour turnaround time when it started at 3:47am. He had a trouble ticket to track and killed himself that same day. Second, he did so to keep the debt from spreading to his family. If he had been better versed in bankruptcy law he would know that his parents weren't responsible (unless they cosigned on his margin account, in which case his death wouldn't make them not responsible.) So it wouldn't accomplish what he expected it to. Three, his suicide note is tragically financially focused and blaming himself. We have bankruptcy so you can ruin your life without needing to end it.

    A much better article than what was referenced in the /. post. [cbsnews.com]

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      it's unreasonable to expect RH customer service to have 10 hour turnaround time when it started at 3:47am.

      No it is not. It is very obviously reasonable to a normal person to expect immediate customer care service when other people's finances and debt are involved.

      Customer care is important. We still live in a society where real people live.

      Robinhood's business model is catching young stupid people and entice them into gambling, and sell their behavioral data to predatory hedge funds who want to keep tab on

      • > No it is not. It is very obviously reasonable to a normal person to expect immediate customer care service when other people's finances and debt are involved.
        Your bank has 24 hour hotlines for everything you want?
        My bank has a central 24 hour hotline to lock cards in case of theft. Everything else is relegated to business hours. Anything more complicated than "send me the form by mail" is relegated to the specialists, which may or may not be reachable at the time of calling.
        • Re: A UI Error (Score:4, Informative)

          by junglee_iitk ( 651040 ) on Tuesday February 09, 2021 @05:45AM (#61043148)

          Yes my bank does have 24x7 customer care service. Furthermore, 3:47 + 10 = is 1 in afternoon. But those are strawman arguments. Even your bank has 24x7 hotline when debt is involved i.e. Credit card. AND your bank doesn't entice you to effectively gamble and then goes quite.

          • A few things to consider
            1) 3:47am + 10 hours is 1:47....in his local time zone. He was home from college, and it looks like his family is based in Illinois. Robinhood is in CA, so it would be 11:47am.

            2) He contacted them via email. Email / secure message support never has quick response, even from major banks. It's usually at least 6 hours before I get an email response from Chase.

            3) This happened in June 2020....in the middle of the pandemic. I tried contacting Chase bank in late May, and their usual 24x7

      • I agree that its unreasonable to have customer service at 3:47am. On the other hand, a large options assignment ($750k) is something for which their *should* be customer service during trading hours. I mentioned in another post that handling assignment on a put spread is a big deal especially in a volatile security. If you let a trader open a put spread for which they don't have near the cash to handle an assignment (which pretty much all platforms do), you have to have a procedure for if and when they g
      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by JeffOwl ( 2858633 )
        This is what it has come to? If you want very low/no fee trades through an app, then you are going to sacrifice customer service. We allow people to choose how much customer service they want. If you want someone to hold your hand then you will need to pay for it. If he wanted that stuff he should have gotten an account with a real brokerage firm. Are you suggesting that everyone be required to pay for the higher tier of customer service, even those people who know what they are doing? Or do you think good
      • It is very obviously reasonable to a normal person to expect immediate customer care service when other people's finances and debt are involved.

        No, it isn't. Specifically, it is not reasonable to expect a trading platform which involves activity that occurs between 9am and 4pm to have customer service at 4am. I know you feel entitled to have everything you want immediately, but that is not how the world works.

        • by jeremyp ( 130771 )

          The activity that occurred was an email at 3am demanding payment of $170k. I think, if you are only going to provide customer support during office hours, it is reasonable only to send emails that might provoke a need for it during office hours.

      • My credit union can take longer to get back to me, especially if a request is put in five hours before they open.
    • Most apropos sig ever at the bottom of this article:

      Every young man should have a hobby: learning how to handle money is the best one. -- Jack Hurley

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by thegarbz ( 1787294 )

      and it's unreasonable to expect RH customer service to have 10 hour turnaround time

      I can't disagree with this more. Even a 1 hour turnaround time is too long for an app used for day trading. I've contact my trading platform precisely once via email and once via phone, and I had a response within 10min to email, and I got through to a person straight away on the phone.

      • Re:A UI Error (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Ed Tice ( 3732157 ) on Tuesday February 09, 2021 @07:41AM (#61043396)
        Especially at his account level. I would probably have an involuntary bowel movement if I got assigned $750k in options and couldn't get clarification especially if there was movement in the underlying security. He had a $173k margin call. For that amount of money, it's in RH's own interest to have customer service.
      • RobinHood isn't a day trading platform.
      • Even a 1 hour turnaround time is too long for an app used for day trading.

        Day traders used to have to pay 10,000/month for access. RH is not a good day trading app. And this wasn't a day trading play. It was a sophisticated options play that made him money, the problem was the different options legs executed at different times.

      • by fred911 ( 83970 )

        ''Even a 1 hour turnaround time is too long for an app used for day trading''

        It's been a while since I've read their TOS, but it was apparent to me that [aside from the obvious platform weakness] that they were not a ''day trading'' friendly platform. In the ''dot com'' days, it was the equivalent of using Ameritrade to execute your orders.

        This pretty much spells out how unfriendly a platform they are for traders [for the idiots that don't understand the inherent disadvantage you have in executing on the li

    • by Hentes ( 2461350 )

      It's almost like these apps shouldn't focus on minors.

    • You mentioned he bought puts and sold shares, but the article that you linked to seems to imply that he bought and sold puts (a "put spread") which would make more sense but even the article isn't clear exactly what his positions were. I don't trade options very much (and have been corrected a few times in other recent slashdot conversation threads about certain trades) but my experience (I use eTrade, not RH) is that you can enter a put spread with just the net debit since that's your actual risk. Lets s
      • Exercising of option is usually on a saturday, rarely on a week day unless the stock is in a takeover

        and Legging in and out of trade is amazingly dangerous, You should always unwind it together

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by Ed Tice ( 3732157 )
          Exercising of options are usually on a Saturday because the options expire on Friday. However, nothing prevents somebody from exercising early. And it would certainly make sense to do so if the owner of shares has a collar and the price has dropped significantly. That way they can have the cash early to reinvest. An in-the-money option may be exercised at any time. And, yes, legging out is dangerous which is exactly my point When the investor was assigned, RH should have unwound the entire position sim
      • You are totally right that what he intended to do was buy and sell option spreads and never own a single share of stock. But the sold put is an obligation to buy the shares, and someone made him follow through on that obligation, so he ended up with a ton of shares and debt. He had the right to sell it at a higher price, so he was likely going to make a small profit.

        He bought and sold a more complex options arrangement than a put spread, but at the time all this happened all the other options were worthle

        • I went back and looked at the brokerages where I have accounts and, yeah, there's now way to place an order should an option be assigned. And yeah this guy totally freaked out. eTrade explains it well. "The debit in your account may be subject to margin charges or even a Fed call, but your risk profile has not changed." (You and I both already knew that).

          https://us.etrade.com/knowledg... [etrade.com]

          But it does seem to be to be horrible service. If you open a put spread (and assuming you opened as a spread) and

    • That this young man thought his life was worth less than $750,000 is so tragic. I would much rather be millions of dollars in debt than have one of my kids commit suicide. I hope I can make this message get through to them.
  • As a comparison (Score:5, Informative)

    by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Tuesday February 09, 2021 @03:22AM (#61042954)

    The trading app I use (Degiro) gives you a 20 question exam before unlocking the ability to simply buy and sell shares. It gives you additional exams for every more advanced function you do. You want to sell shorts: Prove you know what a frigging short is and what risk you take. You want to trade options, prove you know what a frigging option is. In each case some of the questions on the exam are based on risk, leverage and how much money you get to lose.

    Oh and a person answers the phone when you call them.

    This may be dismissed as a kid being an idiot, however a certain amount of responsibility lies at the hand of a company that provides a service, especially one with poor support and shitty interfaces.

    We shouldn't be freely handing out loaded guns and telling people to shoot themselves in the head with them, despite how good it would be to rid the world of stupid people.

    • Re:As a comparison (Score:4, Insightful)

      by geekmux ( 1040042 ) on Tuesday February 09, 2021 @04:07AM (#61043026)

      ...We shouldn't be freely handing out loaded guns and telling people to shoot themselves in the head with them, despite how good it would be to rid the world of stupid people.

      We also shouldn't be freely making rather insane comparisons either. Loaded gun? You call this an analogy?

      Not trying to be cold-hearted about this, but we're not exactly filling headlines daily with suicides related to trading. And from the details I've heard, this young man ended his life rather quickly upon assuming he was suddenly in debt rather than spend perhaps a day researching his position. How did he get into trading? Was there NO other student on campus he could have spoken to that was also using this app? The University of Nebraska, does not teach a single finance course, and therefore, zero professors on campus that could have offered guidance? Had this man realized the debt could never carry over to his parents (his primary concern), he would have likely not ended his life.

      Suicide is hard enough to handle within a family, but when the justifications are this weak, it makes it all the more difficult and painful.

      • Loaded gun? You call this an analogy?

        I mean we could also use the analogy of jumping in front of a train, or off a cliff. The outcome is somewhat the same as in this case.

        • Loaded gun? You call this an analogy?

          I mean we could also use the analogy of jumping in front of a train, or off a cliff. The outcome is somewhat the same as in this case.

          Uh, we're talking about trading apps here. Again, not trying to be cruel, but handing the Robinhood app to 99.999% of the population, does not end in this kind of outcome. Bad analogies, are bad.

        • Loaded gun? You call this an analogy?

          I mean we could also use the analogy of jumping in front of a train, or off a cliff. The outcome is somewhat the same as in this case.

          OK, let's go with the analogy of jumping off a cliff. Instead of a trading app he didn't understand, this person was walking alongside a cliff, admiring the view whilst drinking purified organic water from a reusable bottle. He accidentally drops the bottle, which rolls across the road behind him. The traffic prevents him from running after it. Looking back out at the magnificent view from the cliff, he realizes that his littering has ruined the environment and his parents are going to live in a hellish po

    • by fred911 ( 83970 )

      ''This may be dismissed as a kid being an idiot, however a certain amount of responsibility lies at the hand of a company that provides a service''

      I've said this before, using a quote system from the broker you trade with other than to assure they reconcile correctly is insane. Getting your quotes on WIFI, and expecting to know the current market is even more insane.

      The fact of the matter is it costs a shit-tone of money for timely quotes and millisecond differences make brokerages billions of dollars.

      Besid

    • Nobody told him to "shoot himself in the head". He sought out a tool, used it, and then killed himself when a reasonable adult would not have done so. What kind of person thinks their life so worthless that they'd give up on it after a mere ten hours?

      Someone who was already unpredictably disturbed, that's who. A reasonable person could expect that behavior. Hell, even if he had owed that much, a reasonable person would have first determined if their family faced liability (he was just guessing, not b

  • by backslashdot ( 95548 ) on Tuesday February 09, 2021 @03:28AM (#61042970)

    When you owe the bank five thousand dollars, you have a problem. When you owe the bank five million dollars, the bank has a problem.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • And she has no idea what she is doing. After months of trading I discovered she didn't know what a dividend was. She isn't tracking how much she puts in and takes out so has no idea if she is gaining or losing money. She's anti fluoride but doesn't know what fluoride is. Basically she's stupid but doesn't know it. I'm hoping that she eventually loses enough money to realize that she isn't as smart as she thinks she is and stops wasting her money. It's fine now while she is a student with a good job b
    • Selfown, she's your girlfriend, stupid.

      • How is that a selfown? Maybe she has tits the size of watermelons and is a cracker in bed. Not everyone is attracted to intellect.

        • What he means is "Hey, OP, maybe this girl with tits the size of watermelons who is a a cracker in bed isn't right for you and you should find somebody smarter...and give me her number"
    • What it really comes down to is you can't save people from their own stupidity.

      Sure you can. My trading app gave me an exam before enabling my account. There were 3 questions on dividends on the exam. The app would have told her she's stupid (at least in a trading sense).

      • I believe it's law in Europe that they have to test that you have a hum about what you're doing. A quick check gives me 16 different quizzes on one of the platforms I use, each unlocking a function.

    • I wonder if you realize how big of a problem YOU have here.
      Unless when she loses "all of her money" it's going to be $800 or something. $800 to learn a lesson is something that happens to most of us.

      Girlfriends turn into wives, and joint accounts.
      You really don't want reckless wife who "is stupid but doesn't know it."

      Proceed with great caution, my friend, and maybe seek the advice of some wise and trusted friends. Maybe someone who has already lived through the college years and learned the lessons you two

    • The guy who killed himself set up a well-hedged position that turned a profit. He knew exactly what he was doing. The email from RH spooked him into thinking he had lost all that money, but he had tracked his options and was not only fully-hedged but profitable.

      Please explain to your girlfriend why fluoride is important. Losing all your money in your early 20s is recoverable. Permanently damaging your teeth is less so.

  • It would be good if companies are forced to do due diligence on their customers when allowing them to take risk.
    RH did not do due diligence, and should, by justice, pay a huge amount to the family, even if legally they are not guilty or responsible.
    This needs to be fixed at the legal level.
    • It would be good if companies are forced to do due diligence on their customers when allowing them to take risk.

      Oh, you mean like NINJA loans from banks shoring up bullshit CDOs perpetuating an entire economic collapse, followed by handing an entire nation full of 18-year old kids $80K+ of debt for "higher" education, funding utterly worthless degrees?

      Oh yeah. Our society just screams responsibility.

      RH did not do due diligence, and should, by justice, pay a huge amount to the family, even if legally they are not guilty or responsible. This needs to be fixed at the legal level.

      Yes. everywhere. Won't ever happen. It's a Greed thing.

    • It would be good if companies are forced to do due diligence on their customers when allowing them to take risk.
        RH did not do due diligence, and should, by justice, pay a huge amount to the family, even if legally they are not guilty or responsible.
        This needs to be fixed at the legal level.

      I have 16 different test to unlock functions. I believe it's mandated as part of the mifid eu law.

  • Any of these apps should have required customer service phone numbers that are staffed at least during business hours in every country they operate in. If you can't afford to run a support line in a country then you can't afford to sell an app there either.

    This whole idea of moving fast and breaking things has far too high of a cost. Robinhood has been involved with many problems at this point related to lack of customer support. Their entire business model seems to revolve around not having to support what

    • Any of these apps should have required customer service phone numbers that are staffed at least during business hours in every country they operate in.

      He contacted them at 3:45 in the morning. That is outside of both trading and business hours. He had, in fact, received a case number from customer service. It takes time to investigate a case. He killed himself before they could get the investigation completed.

  • Sigh (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ledow ( 319597 ) on Tuesday February 09, 2021 @06:28AM (#61043234) Homepage

    Someone at age 20 is financially independent, and able to sign legally-binding agreements. If they had one inkling of what they were actually doing, they'd have understood and/or queried and waited for the reply. If it was worrying, they could have confided in someone. Anyone. A friend, a neighbour, a stranger, citizen's advice agencies, anyone at all. Because their advice would have been to wait to hear back and/or talk to someone who knows about such things.

    There's a point at which grown adults have to take responsibility for their own actions, rather than rely on an app to babysit them. And though I am a massive supporter of consumer law, the underdog, and fighting injustices, the app here has done nothing wrong. The guy couldn't even wait until Monday morning to try to get hold of someone. He was obviously in an extremely fragile state of mind anyway.

    I've had a few oh-shit moments in my life, you just have to hold on to see what happens. Sure, if you end up bankrupt, that's not a good outcome for anyone involved, but it takes months if not years to get that far. Fact is, if you were worried about that you don't invest in ways where your money is at risk, or where the risk is strictly limited to your investment and maybe a small amount of fees on top.

    I feel sorry for the family, but the guy gambled his life savings away in a way that made him genuinely believe he'd be ruined for life, far beyond the cost of his investment, and then decided to take his life within a day or so of finding that out. There's no avenue there, there's no chance for help, there's nothing you can reasonably do to stop that, or a similar repeat with a similarly-minded person. And he *HAD* literally gambled his money in a way that he *could* have lost absolutely everything, and in a way that he could easily believe that he had lost everything.

    Even facing ruin, a person of sound mind would just wait until Monday morning, maybe even spend the next week phoning around the company, a financial advisor even, family, friends, even consulting people on the Internet to see if you're interpreting it correctly. They didn't, because they weren't of sound mind in the first place.

    And a person not of sound mind, investing life savings in a way that can turn into a liability way beyond those life savings, at age 20, who then kills themselves within 48 hours without seeking help isn't somebody that we *can* help without that opportunity to do so.

    And that opportunity shouldn't come from a faceless app and a boilerplate email about how they could seek help if they were facing financial difficulty, or any such nonsense like that.

    I'd love to hate on Robinhood here, given what they've done recently to manipulate markets and protect their investors at the expense of everyone else, but expecting an app to somehow save a person in such a position is really quite inhumane when they must have been surrounded by real people that they didn't feel they could go to for help..

    • THIS!

      Personal responsibility (and common sense) are dead in America it appears

      • by vadim_t ( 324782 )

        That was an attempt at personal responsibility on his part.

        He understood that he had fucked up, didn't want his family to have to deal with the fallback, and so he committed suicide thinking that this would somehow prevent his family from being affected. You can't get more personal responsibility than killing yourself to make sure your problems don't become somebody else's problems.

        • The story has a lot of folks blaming RobinHood....

        • Re:Sigh (Score:5, Informative)

          by DaveV1.0 ( 203135 ) on Tuesday February 09, 2021 @10:19AM (#61043726) Journal

          That was an attempt at personal responsibility on his part.
          ....
          You can't get more personal responsibility than killing yourself to make sure your problems don't become somebody else's problems.

          No. It was an attempt to run away from the problem instead of facing the consequences. Personal responsibility would have been actually taking the time to learn about what he was doing, the products he was buying, understanding the situation he was in, and then acting. Instead, he didn't learn about what he was doing, bought things he didn't understand, didn't wait for RH customer service to see what his situation is, and didn't talk to a lawyer. No, he shot himself and now his family wants to blame someone else rather than him and themselves for the way they raised him.

        • Re:Sigh (Score:5, Insightful)

          by geekmux ( 1040042 ) on Tuesday February 09, 2021 @10:40AM (#61043792)

          You can't get more personal responsibility than killing yourself to make sure your problems don't become somebody else's problems.

          Selfish people assume their suicide, doesn't become someone else's problems, especially within their own family where he was loved. Money, was not the only thing lost here.

          God forbid we hear of any of his other friends or family members following suit because of his actions.

        • But had he checked to see if his family would be impacted? Had he considered the option of filing for bankruptcy? Had he asked anyone else for advice? Making such a drastic and permanent decision on the basis of guesswork you could have verified but decided not to, is not responsible adult behavior. It is insane.
    • by fred911 ( 83970 )

      ''Even facing ruin, a person of sound mind would just wait until Monday morning,''

      And would have consumed copious amounts of adult beverages, so that on Monday morning they would have the hangover of the century. The adult way to face the music.

  • by DeplorableCodeMonkey ( 4828467 ) on Tuesday February 09, 2021 @07:33AM (#61043374)

    The suit says that Kearns made three attempts to contact Robinhood customer service regarding the massive underwater balance. However, his messages were met with automated replies, according to the complaint.

    We desperately need the courts to rule that companies cannot hide behind "the computer" on anything from customer service to content moderation decisions that deactivate accounts. Whatever the company puts out to deal with its users should be treated as fungible with a human actor making the decision in the sense of legal agency.

  • I don't like RH much but really struggling to see how they have done anything wrong here. He was an adult and he made financial choices without educating himself first. It is not the brokers responsibility to teach him how margins and options work. I assume RH is like all others where you agree you understand the financial risks involved?
    • RH messed up by telling him he owed a ridiculous amount of money when in fact he owed nothing.

      • RH messed up by telling him he owed a ridiculous amount of money when in fact he owed nothing.

        They told him he owed a ridiculous amount of money? I thought the point was that they told him his position had an unrealized negative amount and he made wild assumptions from there regarding owing anything.

  • Sure, RH did a bad job at informing him about the actual status, but that is not enough to trigger a suicide in a stable adult. I do understand that his loved ones are upset and seek somebody to blame, but the blame on RH is misplaced.

    • And had he waited just a little while longer, he would have seen that the problem didn't even exist. I don't see how anyone else could be held liable for a such an extreme overreaction. A reasonable person would not have done such a thing, nor would they expect someone else to go from zero to suicide in ten hours. Hell, if my life is on the line I'm sure as hell going to do more than make three calls or give up before a pending ticket is resolved. That's fucking insane.

      I don't see how RH could be hel

  • I feel bad for the guy and his family but how is an app on his phone responsible for this? Did he not download it of his own free will? The stocks he chose to trade in were his choice. Educating himself on how calls and puts and shorts work is his responsibility - not the app.

    Traditionally people took responsibility for their own actions but this seems to now be a thing of the past. Now it seems that every misfortune has someone to blame and that someone is never the victim.

  • The suicide was his own decision. And a very bad decision, obviously. Even if the company hadn't fixed their position, or if they had actually been right and he somehow owed hundreds of thousands, that's no good reason to kill yourself.

    The obvious advice for anyone in the situation would be: Wait until (1) you can think clearly, (2) the situation is clear beyond any doubt, and (3) you talked about it with a sensible person. (1) would have told him that you can live even with $700,000 debt, because whoeve
  • Fucking boomer scum.

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