Naperville, USA: A 20-year-old man took his own life after seeing a $730,000 negative balance on a trading application that he installed on his phone.
However, the family of the man said that he did not lose any money at all.
Alexander Kearns was home from college from the University of Nebraska when he became interested in investing.
His family said that Kearns downloaded the application, which is known as Robinhood, and began to make trades.
However, everything changed on Thursday.
Kearns opened the Robinhood application to look at his account, however, he saw that he had a negative $730,000 balance, which led him to do the horrible thing.
William Brewster, a relative of Kearns said:
It’s actually a user interface issue and when Alex opened his app, he saw his cash balance was $730,000 and when you look at the screenshot, he had $16,000 in his account which was his true saving.
The family said that he took a screenshot of the balance and wrote a suicide note.
The dead body of 20-year-old Kearns was found the following day.
He had thrown himself in front of a train.
Brewster said that the issue on the application needs to be fixed.
The relative also said that the company needs to address the potential harm that certain glitches could create.
Robinhood, the application, released a statement about the incident and said:
All of us at Robinhood are deeply saddened to hear this terrible news and we reached out to share our condolences with the family. We will not share any details regarding the account to respect privacy and confidentiality.
The relative of Kearns said that the response that the investment application made was canned.
The family of the deceased is currently searching out contacts in the financial world that could help them find out how the account of Kearns showed a negative balance.