I was also a victim of eTrades deceptive practices and was "ripped off" for $100 for new and unannounced account fees of $25 per quarter for four quarters. This eTrade account had been opened for an employee stock option program, and had about $500 cash collecting almost no interest for more than five years. Each year I checked the account status and reconciled the cash balance.
At the end of 2004 I discovered that eTrade had arbitrarily and without notice started to impose a $25 per quarter service fee four quarters previously. Despite several efforts to correct this, eTrade refused. At one point they said they would be willing to credit $25 but never did issue the credit.
I'm sure this deceptive practice is intended to weed out small investors, but what eTrade doesn't consider is how many bigger investors they lose in the process. I am a fairly big investor using multiple brokers that will now never use eTrade - and I advise everyone I know to also avoid eTrade. So the $100 in fee income is going to have a much great cost to eTrade.
I withdrew all of my money, less the $100 eTrade stole, and closed the account, but there was a few cents left from a late interest payment, so the account remains open, I'm sure costing eTrade significant money in account maintenance.interestingly, the quarterly service charges stopped when there was no more money in the account.
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