This message ruined his life...

on a summer night in 2020 a young man received a notification on his cell phone when he read it he realized his life was over but before we get into his story if you're a fan of the strange dark and mysterious deliberate story format then you come to the right place because that's all we do and we upload three or four times every week so if that's of interest to you please offer to buy the like button and order of their favorite food fried chicken but before you give it to them remove the outer crispy layer from every piece also please subscribe to our channel and turn on all notifications so you don't miss any of our weekly uploads alright let's get into today's stories in the spring of 2020 right when the kobit 19 pandemic was really kicking into high gear students at the university of nebraska were told to move out of their dorms and move back home with their families to prevent the spread of the virus one student 20 year old alex kearns who was enrolled at nebraska on an rotc scholarship was just as shocked as everybody else at how quickly this pandemic had turned their life upside down but in terms of going back home again he wasn't that upset about it because he was close with his family and he figured some unexpected time with them would be nice once he got back to his hometown of naperville illinois which is an affluent suburb outside of chicago he quickly fell into a quarantine routine which consisted mostly of screen time and lounging around but in the evenings he would put his screens away and he would go into the kitchen with his mother dorothy and the two of them would chat for hours about all sorts of things one night he told his mom that he was feeling kind of nervous about what he was going to do with his life after college that even though he was studying business out at the university of nebraska he didn't really know what he was going to do with that all he knew was that he wanted to find a way to help people and his mother and everybody that knew alex would say that that's just alex he was this really gentle nice awesome person that everybody just adored after being home for a few weeks alex was starting to get bored of his quarantine routine and he began looking for other things to do he had seen a number of ads for a new brokerage app called robinhood that was becoming increasingly popular amongst people his age unlike other trading platforms robinhood was designed for the common person there was not huge fees that needed to be paid by the investor as soon as they logged on and the app was very sleek and it turned trading kind of into a game on the app alex had a few thousand dollars in his bank account and so we figured you know what what the heck i'll download robinhood and see what i can do what's the worst that can happen after trading on robin hood for a couple of days alex was hooked and he showed his family that he was actually making a little bit of money and he was learning about the stock market his parents would later recall when they found out he was using robin hood they weren't concerned because alex had always been incredibly careful with his money saving most of it and very rarely spending much of it and so they figured you know he might lose his savings but he's certainly not going to fall into significant debt that's just not alex also there was a safety mechanism in basic accounts on robinhood that protected first-time users from going above ten thousand dollars in debt so even if alex tried to lose more than that the app wouldn't allow him so long as he was using a basic account as the weeks went on alex got more and more confident in his trading ability and he got really familiar with the robin hood app and one day he noticed there was one function he had not tried on the app called options trading for context traditional trading goes like this somebody identifies a stock that they like and then they gamble on it and the way they gamble on it is they buy shares of that stock and if the stock increases in value they make more money if the stock loses value they lose money very simple but some people either can't afford the shares or don't want to buy the shares but they still want to get in on the action of the stock market and for those people they can use something called options trading instead of buying shares options traders will basically sell an insurance policy to other traders who have already purchased shares and this insurance policy they're offering is known as an option these option traders will go up to these shareholders and they'll say for example i'll give you 500 in exchange if your stock tanks and you're losing a ton of money you can exercise your option i.e cash in your insurance policy and i the option holder will cover all of your losses but if your stock stays steady or gains in value i still get to keep your 500 that's non-refundable naturally these options traders they need to be savvy about which stocks they're prepared to cover with their option because if that stock tanks and the shareholder decides to sell sell sell i.e exercise their option then the option holder is obligated to immediately buy all of the shares at a premium and if that shareholder has let's say hundreds of thousands of shares well too bad the option holder is buying all of them so when alex clicked on the options trading button inside of his robinhood app it brought him immediately to an application because robinhood had to make sure anybody on their app that was going to be buying or selling options they needed to be an experienced trader and they needed to understand the risks because they were much higher than a basic account there was no limit to how much debt someone could fall into in trading options alex was a smart guy and a motivated trader but he knew nothing about options trading and so when he saw this application i'm sure he thought to himself yeah i know nothing about options trading there's no way i could possibly get into this but he decided you know what the heck i will apply to go on to their options trading side just to see if they'll accept me so he fills out the application and almost immediately he is accepted onto that side of the platform it would later turn out that application was kind of a sham it did not really do very much to restrict access to that side alex was surprised at his acceptance but he was also very excited and right away he started trading options and he was pretty good at it and pretty quickly he was making a little bit of money but then on june 11th he got a notification on his phone from robin hood and so he pulled his phone up he opened the app and he saw his account was restricted he couldn't make any new trades and he couldn't make any withdrawals and so as he looked at it he scrolled down to the bottom of the page and he saw his current balance and it read negative seven hundred and thirty thousand dollars a trader that alex had sold an option to was exercising his option because his stock had tanked and he owned over seven hundred thousand dollars worth of shares that now alex was obligated to buy alex couldn't believe what he was looking at and he immediately fired off an email to robin hood customer support saying there had to have been a mistake that he had done the math before he had sold that option and he thought at most he was exposed to losing maybe ten thousand dollars certainly not seven hundred thousand dollars and so after he sent this email a couple of minutes later he got a message back from robin hood but it was just an automated response that just said hey you know we got your email and we're busy and we'll be sure to be in touch with you as soon as we possibly can and so at this point alex is starting to panic a little bit because he's looking at his phone and this looks real he's trying to go through his phone to find some place that would show him this was a mistake but there's nothing that indicates this is a mistake and so after a couple of hours alex is just laying in his bed he can't sleep and he sends another message to the customer support team at robin hood pleading with them to please check his account there has to have been a mistake there's no way i would have exposed myself to seven hundred thousand dollars of debt but again all he gets is an automated response that says we're busy and we'll be in touch with you soon a couple hours later at 3 26 a.m alex is still awake probably pacing around his room totally panic-stricken and he looks at his phone and there's another email from robin hood and he's thinking oh my goodness thank you someone's gotten in touch with me to tell me this has been a horrible mistake and so he opens his email and the header of the email is immediate action required and what it was was a notice for him to make his first payment on this enormous debt it was going to be about 170 000 that he had to pay in the next couple of days and if he didn't make this first payment they would seek legal action against him alex was probably terrified and also he was ashamed and didn't want to tell his parents and so all alone in his room he writes a third email to robin hood now straight up begging them someone please look at my account this has got to be wrong but again he just got the automated message and so for the rest of the night alex probably laid on his bed thinking the world was just crashing in on him he knew there was no way he could pay this enormous bill and if he didn't pay it he would either go to jail or hand it off to his family which would financially ruin them and just the idea of doing that to the people he loved made him sick he just could not face that as one of his options and so by the time the sun came up the next morning alex had come to a conclusion about what he was going to do he started by pulling out his phone and pulling up the robin hood app and screenshotting the dashboard that showed his enormous negative balance and then he went on his laptop and he wrote a long letter to his family and he put it on his desktop so they would understand why he did what he was about to do and then he left the house hopped on his bike and peddled away a couple hours later a police officer arrived at the currency's household and he told them that their son their brother alex was unfortunately deceased he had thrown himself in front of a train the family was beyond devastated this caught them so completely off guard it didn't make any sense alex was a happy funny guy with plans for the future he had shown no indications that he wanted to harm himself it really just didn't make any sense and so at some point that day they went to his laptop they opened it up and there was that note he wrote and in this letter he explains to his family how he had fallen into this enormous debt on robin hood he attaches the screenshot that showed his huge negative balance and he said it was just crazy that this company would allow a 20 year old with no income to be exposed to over 700 000 of debt he thought that was crazy but he admitted he didn't know that much about options trading and probably shouldn't have been accepted into their program to begin with and then he tells his family that he did want to live but unfortunately this was the only way he could get out of this problem without inflicting enormous financial penalties on his family and so he believed he was protecting his family when he took his life 24 hours later robin hood sent alex another email and it said oh that 730 000 debt that we said you owed that was a mistake you don't owe anybody any money alex's family has since filed a wrongful death lawsuit against robin hood saying that had they just had a person working their customer service desk they could have talked to alex and immediately seen that this was a mistake and it would have saved alex's life their case is still ongoing so that's going gonna do it guys if you found the secret in today's episode let us know in the comments what it is and where you found it so give us the time stamp and if you're the first to do that we'll pin you at the top of the comment section if you got something out of today's video and you haven't done this already please offer to buy the like button in order of their favorite food fried chicken but before you give it to them remove the outer crispy layer from all of the pieces also please subscribe to our channel and turn on all notifications so you don't miss any of our weekly three or four video uploads if you want to get in touch with me you can direct message me on instagram or on twitter my username for both platforms is the same it's john ballen416 i also have a ton of content over on tiktok where my username is mr ballen i also have a second youtube channel called mr ball and shorts where i post random short videos and lost episodes if you have a story suggestion please submit it to our subreddit just called mr ballin it's linked in the description below so whether i see you on instagram twitter tick tock reddit youtube or some combination just know that i really appreciate your support and until next time that's gonna do it see ya

Channel: MrBallen

Views: 2,513,490

Keywords: strange, dark, mysterious, true, story, scary story, horror story, disturbing, narration, narrator, storyteller, storytelling, solved mystery, true crime, oof, nope, trading, trader, Robinhood, Wall Street, Wall Street bets, day trader, stock broker, brokerage, chicago, Illinois, suburb, university of Nebraska, unl, Nebraska, rotc, Alex Kearns, wrongful death, accident, debt, huge debt, gambling, options trade, options trading, trade, stock, shares, stocks, covid, pandemic, covid 19, coronavirus, quarantine, wow

Id: u-upHQYZbTs

Length: 11min 49sec (709 seconds)

Published: Sat May 01 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/JustChillDudeItsGood]

Fuck Robinhood.

[u/rockitman12]

Fuck Robinhood.

[u/ShatteredReflections]

RobinHood is the enemy.

[u/Jai_Rabbit89]

Let’s all Hold for the kid man!!!! 😤😤😤😤 and when we get our tendies let’s help out his family!

[u/Grumpy_Armadillo]

Things like this is why I keep buying and holding.

My heart hurts for his family and friends 😢

[u/No-State-8495]

I really hope we will witness RobinHood's bankruptcy in the near future!

BUY, VOTE & HODL 💎🖐

[u/PeterSunYoungKi]

R.i.p. hope your soul is at peace knowing we are getting to wreck these fucks

💎🙌🚀🦍🐜🎴

[u/yamaha4fun]

RH is garbage, if you are hodling anything more than a small amount of shares on there, GET OUT NOW!

[u/seattle_exile]

This situation is exactly why options trading is hard to get enabled on other brokers. Robinhood made the barrier of entry lower, but it also makes it easier for people to get in not knowing the risks.

This kid had a spread where the short half executed ITM on expiry. Under their own policy, RH should have closed the position at 3PM Friday and the kid would have been out a few hundred bucks. They didn’t and it executed on margin. Okay, fine - but they only showed the cash half of the execution without reporting the value of the security, which displayed this horrible message to a novice user. He thought his life was over.

Options are a complex financial instrument, and I don’t think it was a very good idea to mix them with an app that has the look and feel of Candy Crush.