Week’s Best: Schwab Faces Fallout From Alleged Gold Scam

Charles Schwab is confronting a lawsuit alleging it missed red flags that could have prevented an elderly client from falling victim to scammers who tricked her into handing over $278,000, much of it in gold bars. The scammers allegedly posed as federal agents and told the victim, who is in her 90s, that her identity had been stolen and instructed her to give them remote access to her computer. What followed was a series of large and irregular drawdowns from her account, which she alleges should have alerted Schwab that something was amiss and prompted it to intervene.