No. That was my complaint. Apparently anyone can fill out a form to transfer assets out of your Vanguard account and it happens immediately without Vanguard contacting you to ask if you authorized this.
The $900,000 is now sitting in that Denver brokerage firm. I was just lucky that I got letter on Monday from the Denver firm with a pin number for accessing a new account and I immediately called them to report it as a fraud. It took 3 calls over 2 days to get the Denver firm to lock down the new brokerage account I DIDN’T OPEN.
I also got a letter saying that an account at Merrill Lynch had been opened in my name and called Merrill to shut that down.
I was just lucky that I’m at home and attentive to opening the mail. The $900,000 would be gone if I was on vacation for a week. This is clearly a gap in the brokerage firm system fraud protection.
intercst