Guys, BEWARE OF TDAMERITRADE's 0% fee advertisement. Their debit card DOES NOT work in many countries, at ALL.

I am in Mexico, I recently opened an account with TD Ameritrade in anticipation of working in Mexico. I spent weeks trying to take out money at ATM's here , in a huge city, not a small town, but kept getting weird errors like Funds not available or can't communicate with bank.

I spoke to 3 different service reps and wasted probably 15 hours of my time.
I finally spoke to Amanda Row , head of banking service. She told me that TD Ameritrade DOES NOT ALLOW ATM transactions in Mexico.

I was convinced that this made no sense because the city I am in has 10 million people, that's bigger than all but about 3 cities in the U.S. And this is a nice city, Maseratis and Mercedes cars, it's not the middle of Mexico.

So this is weird, I CAN use the card to buy items via "credit" in stores and buy items "online" here but I cannot do ATM transactions

so if you have to take out $1000 for example, you're stuck using one of the big banks that charges 3% or $30 for that ATM transaction.

I really feel completely defrauded because I spent a ton of time researching each broker and their fees and spent a ton of time with the application.

TD Ameritrade advertises 0% International transaction fees but then in Mexico, which shares 30% of its GDP with the U.S. or nearly $500 billion of transactions with Americans, TD Ameritrade's card is completely blocked.

And why would it be blocked for secure pin-entered ATM transactions but then work for Online and In-person Non-verified Credit card purchases.

And why does no one know about this? Seems like completely False advertising, something that could probably be investigated by the Department of Justice.

I have debit cards with Etrade, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo, all have worked fine in Mexico, no problems at all. Even smaller banks.

I wonder in what other countries the TD Ameritrade debit card doesn't work?
Maybe in Russia and Eastern Europe?

They said Mexico is high on their "fraud model" but that makes no sense, are they just blocking huge countries so they can lower their chargeback rates while advertising that they provide 0% transaction fees? If you have 0 fraud and 0 service in other countries, Sure, charge 0%, the transactions never work, so no need to charge anything.

And honestly, the first few calls to them , the representative was completely unhelpful and had no idea of this rule. When I did finally speak to Amanda Rowe, she said yes, if I wanted to close my account that would be fine, really no attempt to empathize. I was surprised and very disappointed. I was going to move several hundred thousand dollars over to that TD Ameritrade account but now I'm probably going to close the account. I'm just surprised because Etrade goes out of their way to help you with these types of things, as do most of the online brokers and banks.