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Her Life Savings Mysteriously Disappeared After a Systems Glitch [View all]
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How did this happen?
Her Life Savings Mysteriously Disappeared After a Systems Glitch
Fidelity Investments notified a customer that her phone number and email address had been removed from her profile. When she logged in, her accounts and savings were nowhere to be found.
Alain Pilon
By Tara Siegel Bernard
April 25, 2026, 5:02 a.m. ET
Q. I don’t understand how a systems update could delete all of my financial accounts and existence at Fidelity, with no meaningful explanation or apology. This experience has been and continues to be one of the worst of my life.
— Marta Gruntmane, Eagle, Colo.
Nobody thinks about the enormous amount of faith we put into the invisible infrastructure that continuously tracks and documents our financial accounts, until that one day when things go very wrong.
For Ms. Gruntmane, a 35-year-old physician assistant, that moment came on the Friday morning before Easter, as she was getting ready to take her daughter to school. Fidelity Investments sent messages alerting her that her phone number and email address had been removed from her profile — and to contact Fidelity if she hadn’t done it.
Alarmed, she quickly logged in, “only to find that all of my accounts had disappeared and my balance showed zero dollars."
{snip}
Tara Siegel Bernard writes about personal finance for The Times, from saving for college to paying for retirement and everything in between.
How did this happen?
Her Life Savings Mysteriously Disappeared After a Systems Glitch
Fidelity Investments notified a customer that her phone number and email address had been removed from her profile. When she logged in, her accounts and savings were nowhere to be found.
Alain Pilon
By Tara Siegel Bernard
April 25, 2026, 5:02 a.m. ET
Q. I don’t understand how a systems update could delete all of my financial accounts and existence at Fidelity, with no meaningful explanation or apology. This experience has been and continues to be one of the worst of my life.
— Marta Gruntmane, Eagle, Colo.
Nobody thinks about the enormous amount of faith we put into the invisible infrastructure that continuously tracks and documents our financial accounts, until that one day when things go very wrong.
For Ms. Gruntmane, a 35-year-old physician assistant, that moment came on the Friday morning before Easter, as she was getting ready to take her daughter to school. Fidelity Investments sent messages alerting her that her phone number and email address had been removed from her profile — and to contact Fidelity if she hadn’t done it.
Alarmed, she quickly logged in, “only to find that all of my accounts had disappeared and my balance showed zero dollars."
{snip}
Tara Siegel Bernard writes about personal finance for The Times, from saving for college to paying for retirement and everything in between.
4 replies
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= new reply since forum marked as read