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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;-jeffB, post: 5141624, member: 27832&quot;]As far as big companies and leaks:</p><p><br /></p><p>Many years ago, I started getting spam to my Ameritrade email address. We have our own domain name (&lt;lastname&gt;.&lt;something&gt;), and I can set up as many email aliases as I want, so I had set up a &quot;blah-ameritrade&quot; alias and used that when I opened my account. <b>Nobody else EVER</b> saw that address; I only used it for Ameritrade.</p><p><br /></p><p>I contacted Ameritrade about it. They denied that it could <i>possibly</i> have been their leak, and made the usual condescending suggestions about keeping my email safe. So, I changed my Ameritrade email to &quot;blah-ameritrade-&lt;date&gt;&quot;. Spam kept coming in on the old address, but my Ameritrade email came in on the new one.</p><p><br /></p><p>One month later, I started getting spam on the <i>new</i> address. (Not on any of my dozens of <i>other</i> email aliases, just the Ameritrade one.)</p><p><br /></p><p>I called and raised hell, threatened to take my business elsewhere, told them there was nowhere else it could have leaked from. They still denied that it could have been them, but offered me some free trades to stay on.</p><p><br /></p><p>A bit more than a year later, <a href="https://www.marketwatch.com/story/td-ameritrade-discloses-leak-of-some-client-data" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="https://www.marketwatch.com/story/td-ameritrade-discloses-leak-of-some-client-data" rel="nofollow">the story hit the news</a>. Nope, it wasn&#039;t just me. The company pinky-swore that it was <i>only</i> email addresses that had leaked (not &quot;were leaking&quot;, mind you), and not phone numbers, or SSNs, or, you know, <i>money</i>. I never saw evidence that any of my other personal info had gotten out -- after ten or fifteen years, if it were going to happen, it would&#039;ve happened by now -- and I never did go to the trouble of jumping ship.</p><p><br /></p><p>But I did permanently adjust my expectations of how much I can trust &quot;big, established, highly-professional operations&quot;.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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