Bank of America’s Merrill Lynch routinely misled customers by telling them billions of stock trades had been managed in-house when they were actually turned over to outside firms, part of a five-year scheme that New York’s attorney general says made the bank’s trading services appear more sophisticated than they were.
On Friday, the attorney general announced a $42 million settlement with Bank of America over what it called the “masking” strategy, which was applied to 16 million client trade orders between 2008 and 2013, representing over 4 billion traded shares.