How I lost all my investments overnight.

My e-toro horror story.

Last April 2021, after quite a bit of prodding, I finally bit the bullet and started my journey into the stock market. Online trading had started to boom during the pandemic and it seemed like a good idea to learn something new and hopefully get my money working as hard as I did to earn it. It was my first time to ever dabble in any form of investing, and like most newbies, I was very nervous about it. 

But I was assured that it’s no more difficult than using any online shopping platform. Especially with these new apps like Robin Hood and e-Toro. “It will be fun” they said. “Give it a try” they said. So I only agreed if my son would help me open an online trading account and help me manage it, which he did, and that’s basically how we got started.

We settled on e-Toro as it was very simple to set up an account, plus it was the only one that took my credit card. My son chose the stocks carefully, explained what each of the companies did and why he anticipated growth. It was fun. As my confidence grew, I added a little more cash each time I had a little extra income. I was finding it to be very interesting and informative and I must admit that I throughly enjoyed having another shared interest with my son––which turned out to be the best investment so far.

After a month or so of learning the ropes, I gathered enough confidence to take the training wheels off and start trading on my own and even opened my own account. It felt good to have direct control over your own investments. I also found out about Bitcoin and cryptocurrency. 

This is where it got really interesting. Because when you invest crypto, you don’t just learn about the coins you are buying—you learn about macro economics, centralized finance, foreign debt, monetary policy, geopolitics, greed, manipulation, philosophy, decentralization, the origins of money and the importance of personal sovereignty. It’s quite the rabbit hole. 

But contrary to what I was told when I was starting the e-Toro portfolio, this time, I was sternly warned. 

“You’ll lose everything in crypto” they said.  “That’s a Ponzi scheme” they said. “rat poison!” They said. “Bitcoin is only used by criminals.” They said. “It’s not regulated, so it’s unsafe.” “Stay away.” “You’ll get burned.” They said. 

My bank even went as far as blocking my credit card and restricting my account so I couldn’t buy Bitcoin—even if it is a fully legal and recognized asset by the BSP. Seemed everyone I asked tried to talk me out of it. 

Now the old me would have just cowered in fear and listened. And by old, I’m talking about March 2021 James. I was clueless. But four months into this crypto journey, you start to see things that you can no longer unsee––like the manipulation by institutions, shady Wall Street insiders and the quantitative easing of the FEDS that has been propping up the US stock market, plus the outrageous and unnecessary fees and friction costs of the legacy system––so I started losing confidence and started investing more into crypto and stopped putting any more in e-Toro. 

By late August, I had doubled my modest investment in crypto, while my eToro had lost about a hundred dollars during around the same amount of time. Now I know that 4 months is not a long enough time to judge the stock market, but after seeing how the FEDS wouldn’t stop printing money and debasing their currency, plus the taper tantrums that Wall Street throw every time they stop receiving that free money, it seemed silly to keep my equity tied up in there. Also, considering that tuition and other big bills started piling up and income was going down, we decided to just cash out and maybe revisit it another time. And that’s when the nightmare began. 

Seems eToro have no issue taking your money. They charged my credit card like a wounded bull when we were buying the stock, but once it came time to withdraw, however, that’s when the real pain begins. All of a sudden, everything is a problem. It’s the classic bait and switch.

I waited 4-5 days and nothing. So I wrote to eToro every day, sometimes twice a day. It takes them an average of 3 days to answer. Seems they keep traditional banking hours over there, despite claiming to be part of the new frontier. They eventually wrote back and said they blocked my credit card because a father and a son cannot share an account. I was like, huh? Didn’t seem like that was a problem when I opened it. But they smugly reminded me that it is stated in their terms and conditions, so now I’m being punished for that. 

I said, ok, fine, so then just give me my money back and we can close the account. They tried talking me out of it, but later conceded and asked me to choose a new method like PayPal (which I don’t like to use because of the poor exchange rate) but out of desperation, I did. Anything to end the suffering.

Denied again. 

No explanation given except that the withdrawal is still under review. I spoke to 3 customer service agents from 3 different countries and they all gave me the same condescending lecture about sharing an account with my son. They then said I had to send a selfie holding up my ID like a criminal and then show them all my screenshots of my PayPal account, with my email address and other details. This was after I verified my identity three times with their customer service officers. 

But I complied anyway. Then I waited. And waited. And waited. 

After a couple of days of nothing, I woke up last Saturday to check my PayPal. Still nothing. So I checked my eToro portfolio, and to my absolute horror, there was nothing left in there either. It was totally wiped out. 0.00 balance. All my money gone and not a single word from eToro. 

It took 4 days for someone to finally speak to me. That’s 4 days of unanswered emails and messages; four days of not knowing where the hell your money is, what to do, or any assurance that you’ll ever get it back; basically, four days of pure torment and agony. It’s been two weeks since my withdrawal request, and as of this writing, still nothing.

So I’m writing this to warn people, especially first time investors, because this is the exact thing newbies fear—waking up and finding out you’ve been cleaned out and not having anyone to talk to about it. It’s the worst feeling ever. There’s so much going on when you begin your journey in investing and something like this is an absolute deal breaker. Criminal, even.

The irony here is, the initial plan was really to invest in crypto from the start. We only chose e-Toro because this was the only trading platform my bank would allow me to trade with. Because crypto bad, remember?

The only thing honest about e-Toro is it lives up to its name--total bull.