Robinhood had received almost half of its revenue from payment for order flow. The company later confirmed this on its corporate website when asked by CNBC. The Wall Street Journal found that Robinhood "appears to be taking more cash for orders than rivals," by up to a 60-to-1 ratio, according to its regulatory filings. The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority fined Robinhood $1.25 million in December 2019 for failing to ensure that its customers received the best price for orders. All of Robinhood's trades between October 2016 and November 2017 were routed to companies that paid for order flow, and the company did not consider the price improvement which may have been obtained through other market makers. Robinhood was sued in a class-action law suit in December 2020 for failing to disclose that a large portion of its revenue relied on payment for order flow. Security breaches In July 2019, Robinhood admitted to storing customer passwords in cleartext and in readable form across their internal systems, according to emails it sent to the affected customers. Robinhood declined to say how many customers were affected by the error and claims that it did not find any evidence of abuse. However, in 2020, the firm acknowledged that almost 2,000 Robinhood Markets accounts were compromised in the hack and that the hackers had siphoned off customer funds — a sign that the attacks were more widespread than was previously known, and not forthcoming originally by Robinhood. In early November 2021 the company announced that about 5 million customers had their email addresses stolen by hackers via a voice phishing scheme. Another 2 million customers's full names were also taken. Three hundred customers had more extensive personal information taken. It is believed that the hacker "pompompurin" who was behind the 2021 FBI email hack was responsible for the breach. Infinite leverage In November 2019, a user on the WallStreetBets subreddit shared a glitch that allowed Robinhood Gold users to borrow unlimited funds via selling covered calls where the shares had been bought using leverage, and the premium from the call was used to access additional leverage to buy more shares in order to sell more calls and so on. The loophole was closed shortly thereafter and the accounts that exploited it were suspended, but not before some accounts recorded six figure losses by using what WallStreetBets users dubbed the "infinite money cheat code." Outages On