Mr. Ballin

And pretty quickly he was making a little bit of money.

But then on June 11th, he got a notification on his phone from Robinhood.

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 $730,000.

A trader that Alex had sold an option to was exercising his option because his stock had tanked and he owned over $700,000 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 Robinhood 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 $10,000, certainly not $700,000.

And so after he sent this email, a couple of minutes later, he got a message back from Robinhood, 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.

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 Robinhood 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 $700,000 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 Robinhood 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.

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.