The SIPC denied those claims, and Robinhood rebranded the service into Cash Management the following day. In December 2018, it also falsely claimed that its checking and savings accounts, granted via Sutton Bank of Ohio, were SIPC insured. As previously mentioned, in September 2020, the SEC launched a probe into Robinhood for selling its order book to high-frequency trading firms, allowing them to front-run client orders and potentially resulting in less favorable pricing for Robinhood traders. Robinhood is also a member of the non-profit Securities Investor Protection Corporation (SIPC). (FINRA), a private US corporation that acts as a self-regulatory organization (SRO) the SEC remains the ultimate regulator. Robinhood operates under the oversight of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority Inc. Nearly half of all Robinhood traders claim to use it daily, and 90% at least weekly most traders prefer to trade from their mobile phones. Robinhood remains in high demand among new retail traders, many of whom generally have little to no knowledge of financial markets. Robinhood does sell its order book to high-frequency trading firms, which prompted the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to launch a probe in September 2020. Another attractive feature is fractional shares trading, eliminating the need for massive deposits to trade blue-chip equities. It also expanded into cryptocurrency trading via Robinhood Crypto. Robinhood caters primarily to millennial traders with an average age of 26. Making financial markets accessible to all traders without additional costs remains the mission of Robinhood, which has over 13,000,000 users according to its latest SEC filing. In 2015, this US-based financial services company officially launched its trading app. The company said that halting purchases on Thursday was “a risk-management decision.Robinhood Markets, founded in 2013, is a pioneer in commission-free trading. Later on Thursday, Robinhood said it would allow “limited buys” of certain stocks on Friday. Unhappy Robinhood users aren’t just using reviews to show their ire - they’re also calling for a class action lawsuit. However, popular apps like TikTok, Uno, and Genshin Impact also didn’t have reviews from any later than Wednesday when we checked. On Apple’s App Store, Robinhood has a 4.7 rating, and we didn’t see any reviews newer than Wednesday. Google says companies do not have the ability to delete reviews themselves.
Google’s policies explicitly prohibit reviews intended to manipulate an app’s rating, and the company says it has a system that “combines human intelligence with machine learning to detect and enforce policy violations in ratings and reviews.” Google says it specifically took action on reviews that it felt confident violated those policies, the company tells The Verge. It’s not outside Google’s purview to delete these posts. Robinhood’s Play Store rating later on Thursday. Image: 9to5GoogleĪnd here’s a screenshot we took shortly before publishing this article, showing a nearly four-star rating and around 180,000 reviews.
Here’s a screenshot from the Play Store page captured by 9to5Google when the app had a one-star rating and nearly 275,000 reviews: Robinhood’s page on the Play Store earlier on Thursday. Robinhood came under intense scrutiny on Thursday, after the stock trading app announced it would block purchases of GameStop, AMC, and other stocks made popular by the r/WallStreetBets subreddit, and some users have already replaced their deleted one-star reviews with new ones to make their anger heard. After some disgruntled Robinhood users organized campaigns to give the app a one-star review on Google’s Play Store and Apple’s App Store - and succeeded in review-bombing it all the way down to a one-star rating - the company has now deleted enough reviews to bring it back up to nearly four stars. Google is actively removing negative reviews of the Robinhood app from the Google Play Store, the company confirmed to The Verge.