Kcim...
Yeah, I found out about it in a similar manner. Frankly, after all I've been through and learned about Ameritrade, Etrade and a few other online brokers, I don't trust any of them anymore.
I recently re-opened an account with Interactive Brokers. They are a direct access broker, which has many advantages over the online brokers...the greatest being is that you have much more power and flexibility with who you choose to place your orders with. Commissions are also much lower. When I buy shares of SPRL through them, the commission is a dollar minimum for small lot orders and .002 x the total cost of the shares for large lots. So, if I was to buy 100k shares of SPRL at .012 I would pay a $2.40 commission.
There are some drawbacks though. IB currently doesn't trade as many otcbb/pinks as the online brokers. It takes a bit more savvy to learn how to use the "traders workstation" interface that you would do your trading from. Also, sometimes you can't initially trade at the third or fourth decimal place on the otc/pinks, but I have emailed them about that in the past and they have actually had their programmers make the appropriate software changes to allow that to take place. I have been told that in the future they will be offering more otc/pink stocks and that they will eventually change the software so that you wouldn't have to ask to be able to trade further to the right of the decimal.
There are a lot of other advantages to using IB that you would be better off reading about on their site. Might be something you want to check out.
Take care.
Rich
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