My E*TRADE tale: how NOT to treat the customer Financial institutions are known for treating their customers like cattle, but my recent experience with the E*TRADE brokerage has me envying the cows.

I use E*TRADE as a backup to my bank, occasionally transferring money into the brokerage for investment. Often these sums are pretty large. The transfers have always been smooth in the past, but when I tried to move a fairly large sum out of E*TRADE and back to my bank two weeks ago, the transaction didn't go through.

The trouble was that the system didn't tell me that the time (although E*TRADE claims it did). It simply made my accounts disappear. So when I noticed a week later that the transfer had never gone through, I went online to look at my accounts. They were gone. All of them.

I stayed calm, and called the brokerage, which told me to call back in the morning. When I called today, I was told that the accounts had been frozen as a security measure and that I had to go through an identity verification process to make the transfer. Okay, that's reasonable, but why hadn't anyone called me when I initiated the transaction 10 days earlier?

They did, on March 13, I was told, and they left a message. Really? I never got that message. And I wonder why they left one message in nine days ago and didn't bother to follow up when I didn't return it? It doesn't sound like they were all that keen on getting to the bottom of the story. Well, they tried to reach me, I was told.

What number did they use, I asked? I was read an old work number and I hadn't used in about five years. Did anyone notice that the voice mail that answered the phone didn't identify themselves as me, I asked? They didn't have an answer for that.

I've been making large transfers like this for years, I said, and I've never been run through this gauntlet. I was told that it's a new policy to confirm all large transfers. Really, I asked? No one at either E*TRADE or my bank asked any questions when I transferred an even larger amount of money into the account a few weeks earlier. So it's only suspicious when you transfer money out, I guess.

By the way, I'm still waiting on some paperwork that the E*TRADE rep was supposed to send me on another issue seven months ago. It doesn't really matter. By the time I get the paperwork, I'll be with another brokerage.  ¶ 9:40 AM