SEC Preemption Comment Letter
Investor Protection | Regulatory Commentary The SEC Wants to End State Review of Non-Traded REIT Offerings. I Filed a Comment Letter Explaining Why That Would Hurt Retail Investors. A proposed rule would strip away the last substantive review that non-traded REITs, non-traded BDCs, and similar illiquid products receive before they are sold to the public. […]
Fraud Awareness
Investor Alert The Investment Scam Most Americans Cannot Name, and Why That Gap Is Expensive New research published this month by the FINRA Investor Education Foundation and RAND finds that when Americans are asked to name fraud schemes, only 17 percent can name the category behind investment scams: the frauds that lure victims with promises […]
The Hidden Risks of Social Media Investment Clubs
Investor Alerts The Hidden Risks of Social Media Investment Clubs The investment scams I prosecuted at the SEC spread through churches, workplaces, and kitchen tables. Today they spread through WhatsApp groups, Telegram channels, and Facebook communities, and they move faster than anything I saw twenty years ago. The biggest case of my SEC career, a […]
Too Much of Your Money in One Investment?
Investor Alerts What Happens When a Broker Puts Too Much of Your Money in One Investment? Of all the misconduct patterns I saw in a decade at the SEC’s Miami Regional Office, overconcentration is the one that does its damage most quietly. There is no forged document, no unauthorized trade, often no single moment anything […]
When Bad Advice Becomes Broker Negligence
Investor Alerts When Bad Investment Advice Becomes Broker Negligence The hardest question in my practice is not whether an investor lost money. The statements answer that. The hard question is which side of a legal line the loss sits on, because the law does not compensate bad outcomes. It compensates breaches of duty. A recommendation […]
SEC Enforcement Slows. Investor Claims Do Not
Investor Alerts SEC Enforcement Is Slowing. Here Is What That Means for Defrauded Investors. I spent more than a decade building enforcement cases inside the SEC’s Miami Regional Office, so I read the agency’s enforcement statistics the way a former line officer reads dispatch logs. The recent numbers tell a clear story. Cornerstone Research reported […]
Did Your Broker Trade Without Permission?
Investor Alerts Did Your Broker Make Trades Without Your Permission? You open a statement and there they are. Positions you never discussed, sales you never approved, activity that has no connection to any conversation you remember having. The industry name for this is unauthorized trading, and I want to say plainly what it is, because […]
Can You Recover Losses in FINRA Arbitration?
Investor Alerts Can You Recover Investment Losses Through FINRA Arbitration? The short answer is yes, when the losses were caused by misconduct rather than by the market. That distinction is the entire subject. Markets fall, and a loss the market caused is a risk you accepted. A loss caused by an unsuitable recommendation, a concentrated […]
Warning Signs of Elder Financial Exploitation
Investor Alerts How Families Can Recognize Financial Exploitation of an Elderly Investor The elder exploitation cases in my practice almost never come to me from the investor. They come from a son reviewing statements after a health scare, a daughter who noticed her father had grown evasive about money, a family that discovered the new […]
AI Investment Scams and How to Spot Them
Investor Alerts AI Investment Scams Are Getting Harder to Spot In a decade of fraud investigations at the SEC’s Miami Regional Office, I learned that investment scams change their costumes constantly and their skeleton never. The promise of high returns with little risk, the manufactured urgency, the reason you cannot quite verify anything. Artificial intelligence […]