Canopy Financial made the news a couple of weeks back when it declared bankruptcy in the latest corporate scandal, taking many millions of investor's money down. What is less known is what it did to its customers.
I had a Health Savings Account (HSA), the type that one can use with a high-deductible health insurance. My HSA was administered by Shawnee Administrative Services. Shawnee, in turn, used Canopy Financial's services to maintain the HSA accounts. At the end of November, the debit card for my HSA suddenly stopped working, and on December 8th I was served with a letter stating that my HSA was "misappropriated" and that I am now a creditor to Canopy Financial.in a subsequent series of phone calls to Shawnee I found out about the messy situation behind the scenes, which may be best described as Canopy taking the HSA funds of multiple depositors and misdirecting the money somewhere else, I do not know where exactly. All the while I believed that the HSA is safe in an FDIC-insured bank! What makes the situation crazy, is that Canopy is neither a bank, nor a broker nor any other financial institution; it is merely an IT company that develops and markets software for moving the money around between financial institutions. So this is not exactly the type of business that one would investigate when opening an account. After all, do you know what company made the software used by your bank?
A recorded message on Canopy's information hotline, 877-288-0731, states that there are at least 1,000 account holders in my situation. My loss is about $4500. Multiple by a thousand, that's $4.5 million stolen. What makes it even worse, is that the money stolen was saved for payment of health insurance deductibles.
Now Canopy is pursuing Chapter 11 bankruptcy, meaning that the company seeks reorganization and charge-off of certain debts, that no doubt would include my Health Savings Account, and to continue operations afterwards.in all honesty, I believe that they should not be allowed to do that. They cannot be trusted with one's money, and in particular, money saved for healthcare. Shut them down completely, force to sell computers and furniture, and then go after the personal wealth of the founders: Vikram Kashyap, Jeremy Blackburn, Anthony Banas and corporate officers: Scott Hazdra (Chief Security Officer) and John Ingram (Chief Administrative Officer).
Anyone else victimized by Canopy Financial, please add to this report.
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