REDACTED v. Charles Schwab, Bank of America, and Unchained Trading
U.S. District Court – Central District of California
Case Overview
Silver Miller , alongside co-counsel Kronenberger Rosenfeld, LLP, is pursuing a federal lawsuit in the Northern District of California on behalf of a senior citizen couple victimized in a $30 million elder financial manipulation scheme. This case alleges Charles Schwab, Bank of America, and Unchained Trading (a cryptocurrency exchange) fueled fraudulent activity and that each company failed to meet its obligations to protect the victims and their assets from an obvious fraud.
Elder Abuse Scam
According to the lawsuit, the victims’ accounts demonstrated clear and overt “red flags” of elder financial abuse. Despite that information, financial professionals at Charles Schwab, Bank of America, and Unchained Trading — with actual notice of the anomalous behavior, illogical account sequencing, and knowledge that other banks had refused and returned suspicious wire transfers in the victims’ accounts — failed to act. Instead, Charles Schwab, Bank of America, and Unchained Trading ignored their responsibilities to perform required Enhanced Due Diligence and allegedly only tried to sell more services to the couple, services that were attempted to be sold predicated on the companies’ actual knowledge of exploitative behavior in the victims’ accounts that should have triggered protective measures instead of additional exploitative behavior.
Scam Details
The threat actor, armed with confidential insider knowledge about Charles Schwab and the victims’ accounts, convinced the victims that their investment accounts were compromised. The victims’ accounts were liquidated, their assets were transferred to different bank accounts, and their assets were ultimately converted into cryptocurrency on Unchained Trading for alleged safekeeping. In under eight weeks, almost Thirty Million Dollars ($30,000,000.00) was moved between the financial institutions; and almost all of it is now missing.
Gross Negligence Allegations
The lawsuit accuses these institutions of failing to implement standard safeguards, such as Know Your Customer (KYC) and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) protocols, which are required under the Bank Secrecy Act. Even as millions of stolen dollars flowed through the victims’ accounts in a short period, no steps were taken to protect the victims and no Enhanced Due Diligence was performed as required by the institutions.
Corporate History and Federal Investigations
In 2020, Charles Schwab acquired TD Ameritrade, where the victims had their investments before they were transferred as part of the Charles Schwab and TD Ameritrade merger. This is notable because a federal investigation revealed that TD Bank, a part of the same corporate family, had engaged in facilitating money laundering for nearly a decade and that insiders at the bank were compromised and had released to criminal actors confidential TD Bank client information. The investigation resulted in over $3 billion in fines for failing to detect illicit activity and accepting bribes.
Additionally, Charles Schwab has disclosed it was responsible for an August 2023 customer data breach that exposed confidential customer information and other sensitive customer data, which Schwab itself conceded increased the risk of identity theft and other fraudulent activities such as those which were inflicted upon the plaintiffs in the lawsuit.
Silver Miller’s Mission
Silver Miller is committed to holding financial institutions accountable when they fail to protect vulnerable clients from any type of financial fraud. The firm aims to secure justice for the victims in this case, who suffered substantial financial losses due to the negligence of trusted financial institutions Charles Schwab, Bank of America, and Unchained Trading.
