Andrew Stoltmann

Andrew Stoltmann and Joe Wojciechowski brought the claim against T-Mobile, on the theory that the loss began when the carrier moved the number. They filed with the American Arbitration Association under its consumer rules, alleging breach of contract, negligence and violations of the Federal Communications Act. T-Mobile asked the arbitrator to dismiss the claim as a matter of law before any hearing. The hearing went forward and lasted nearly four days, and the arbitrator awarded $995,000: $750,000 in compensatory damages, $225,000 in attorney's fees and $20,000 in expenses.

The Phone Book

Stoltmann grew up in Milwaukee. When he was nine, his father lost $80,000 in a real estate investment. "We thought we were going to lose our house," Stoltmann has said.

He graduated from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1994 with a business degree and took his first job as a broker at Olde Discount, where he was handed a phone book and told to start cold-calling. He complained about abuses he saw there, and Olde fired him. In September 1998 the Securities and Exchange Commission found that from the fall of 1992 through at least August 1995 Olde had required its brokers to build an average of two positions a day in its "special venture" stocks, worth at least $20,000, or risk termination, and that its policies had enabled churning, unauthorized trading, misrepresentations and unsuitable recommendations. Olde paid a $4 million penalty; its founder, Ernest J. Olde, paid $1 million and was suspended from the industry for a year.

From Olde, Stoltmann went to Merrill Lynch in Milwaukee. He left the industry in 1996 and enrolled at DePaul University College of Law, where he clerked in the Chicago office of NASD Dispute Resolution, the arbitration forum FINRA now runs. He earned his J.D. in 1999 and became a partner at Maddox, Hargett & Caruso, a firm representing investors. He edited the PIABA Bar Journal from 2001 through 2005 and co-authored Investor Rights for the Year 2000 and Beyond.

Fictitious Bonds

Regald B. Smith was a broker in the Pikeville, Kentucky, branch of Stifel, Nicolaus & Co. Among his clients were David May and his son, David Franklin May II, who ran a family mining operation. Smith sold them bonds that did not exist and kept their $500,000. In March 2000 he told them falsely that he had sold their Qualcomm shares and told them to disregard the statements that still showed the stock; they lost $1.54 million. He told them falsely that their CMGI shares carried protective limits; they lost $4.5 million on the holding. Smith pleaded guilty to wire fraud in October 2000, and in February 2001 Judge Joseph M. Hood sentenced him to 24 months in prison and ordered $4,759,319 in restitution. The SEC charged that he had spent part of the money renovating the Hotel Anthony in Pikeville.

Stoltmann and Mark Maddox built the Mays' claim against Stifel from the statements Smith had told them to ignore, the trading records and the firm's supervision of Smith: twenty-six customer complaints against him, a branch manager who had been suspended and fined for supervisory failures at a previous firm, and a grand jury subpoena that reached Stifel four months before it fired him. In November 2002 an NASD arbitration panel awarded the Mays $4.47 million.

Stoltmann opened Stoltmann Law Offices in Chicago in March 2005. Its claims are heard in FINRA, AAA and JAMS arbitration and in court, and have involved Ponzi schemes, over-concentrated portfolios, unauthorized trading and the exploitation of older investors. Each separates a market loss from a loss caused by conduct, through questions the record can answer: whether a recommendation fit the customer, whether material facts were disclosed, who had authority to trade the account, and what the firm did with warnings it already had.

In September 2009 a FINRA panel awarded former Chicago Bulls forward Horace Grant $1.46 million over his losses in Morgan Keegan bond funds, and the award withstood Morgan Keegan's challenges in the federal court in Los Angeles and, in 2012, in the Ninth Circuit. In November 2009 another panel awarded a 90-year-old widow more than $1.1 million against William Blair & Co. on claims of breach of fiduciary duty and unauthorized trading that turned on who had been picking the trades. Panels also awarded about $700,000 in King v. Morgan Keegan, on mutual-fund claims, and more than $400,000 in Baldwin v. Wachovia, where unauthorized trading had produced a tax bill.

$62.1 Million

In February 2016 the Public Investors Arbitration Bar Association published a study of what happens after an investor wins. About a quarter of the awards issued to investors in 2013, $62.1 million, had not been paid; the firms that owed the money had closed, disappeared or declined to pay.

Stoltmann had joined PIABA's board in 2013. As president-elect in September 2017, he put an industry-financed national recovery pool for unpaid awards at the head of his agenda and estimated its cost at less than $100 per registered representative. He also pressed to preserve the fiduciary standard for retirement advice, to end non-attorney representation of investors in the FINRA forum, and to send requests to expunge misconduct from BrokerCheck to independent national review; BrokerCheck, he said, had "more holes than a piece of Swiss cheese."

He served as president for the 2017–2018 term. On March 6, 2018, Senator Elizabeth Warren introduced the Compensation for Cheated Investors Act, directing FINRA to pay unpaid awards from a pool funded by penalties on its members. The next day PIABA released a report Stoltmann wrote with Hugh D. Berkson: from 2012 through 2016, 268 awards totaling $199 million, 27 percent of the cases investors won, had gone unpaid, and a pool would have cost $23.24 per registered broker for 2016 and $32.78 for 2017. Investors cheated by an adviser, Stoltmann said, faced "a second abuse: the inability to collect an arbitration award."

Since 2009 he has taught securities law as an adjunct professor at Northwestern's law school, and in 2017 he and the journalist John Wasik published Waging War on Wall Street.

TaskUs

Between January 6 and 9, 2024, someone took over Ashok Maini's Coinbase account. The attackers made social-engineering phone calls, held confidential details of the account, including its balances and his Social Security number, and got in through a Windows device, unlike the Apple devices in his account history. They converted twenty cryptocurrencies to dollars, consolidated the proceeds in ether and withdrew them through ChangeNow, N.exchange and RailGun.

Coinbase had shared its customers' account information with TaskUs, an outside customer-support contractor, whose employees accessed it, Maini's included, and allegedly sold it to cybercriminals. Coinbase learned of the breach in January 2025 and told customers on May 15, 2025. Its chief executive, Brian Armstrong, publicly promised to reimburse customers who had been socially engineered as a result. Coinbase refused to reimburse Maini.

Stoltmann and Sara Hanley tried Maini's claim before Arbitrator Steven Michael Ruffalo from October 14 to 16, 2025, with 309 exhibits. On December 11, 2025, Ruffalo awarded Maini $617,215.26: $329,665.12 for the cryptocurrency at its value on January 9, 2024, $150,000 for the loss of use and the reimbursement Coinbase had promised and withheld, $95,602.85 in attorney's fees and $41,947.29 in costs. He found that Coinbase had been grossly negligent, "a want of even scant care," in sharing customer account information with TaskUs, that it had breached its contract and its fiduciary duties as Maini's custodian, and that it had misrepresented its security as "bank-level."

Coinbase had sent its warnings by email, though it knew that more than 95 percent of account takeovers involved a compromised email account, and had let the transfers go through despite multiple high-risk alerts. Somebody was supposed to be watching.