Air Force Veteran Angel Morales lost more than $13,000 after someone got into his public.com account. Public.com did not provide compensation.
SAN ANTONIO — Sitting in a doctor’s office waiting room at 9 a.m., Angel Morales stared at his phone in disbelief.
The Air Force veteran was waiting for a relative to finish their appointment and had decided to check his emails.
He suddenly realized that someone was stealing his money.
Morales had a high-yield savings account with an investment platform called Public.com. The account was supposed to only accrue interest and Morales said he had never used it for day trading.
But Morales now saw an email from Public.com that said someone had logged into his account from a desktop computer just before 7 a.m., and more emails showed his account had already been used for around 30 transactions.
The veteran needed to contact the company immediately but there was no option to call Public.com on the phone. Morales sent an email at 9:03 a.m. which clearly stated “I am in immediate need of assistance” and said there was someone in his account that wasn’t him.
Unfortunately, he did not get immediate assistance.
Morales watched for the next 16 minutes as trade after trade continued to drain his account. Then, when the company did email back at 9:19 a.m. the response came from an AI bot. The AI said it had started a “ticket”.
“I wanted them to stop the transactions!” Morales said. “It wasn’t even a real person.”
Instead, the transactions kept happening.
Emails show a human representative did eventually freeze the account nearly an hour later at 10:17 a.m. Unfortunately, by then, more than 50 unauthorized transactions had gone through and his money was gone.
The veteran lost more than $13,000 in total.
“This is money that we had been saving for two years and this is where we are at,” Morales said. “Something should have gone off. A light should have been turned on that this was unusual for this account.”
Morales was still hoping the company could reverse the transactions or at least provide compensation. Public.com representatives told Morales via email they were investigating the situation.
The next day, a Public.com representative sent an email that said Morales’s credentials were used in the unauthorized login, so Public.com was not to blame. It said Public.com would not provide any compensation.
The email said, “Because the unauthorized activity was the result of your personal account credentials being compromised, and not the result of a breach of Public’s systems, we will not be compensating for any market or trading loss incurred. We also will not be performing any corrections to remove or cancel trades that occurred during this period.”
The company then suggested he make a police report.
Morales said he still doesn’t understand how that’s possible. He also still doesn’t understand why the trades were not cancelled or frozen when he first reached out or why the company waited an hour to freeze the account. He called KENS 5.
KENS 5 contacted Public.com four days in a row and called the company’s attorney on her cell phone. The attorney said on the phone she would forward our request but KENS 5 never saw any response from the company.
Morales has already contacted the Federal Trade Commission and other agencies about the issue. Now he wants other people to know what happened before it’s too late.
“They were never there for me,” Morales said. “I don’t know what kind of system they have in place to protect the consumer but if it is this way it is not a very good system.”
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