Protect Your Portfolio from SCAM Wealth Advisors
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All right, kids, beware of false advertising. You know, I’m usually pretty abreast of all the comings and goings when it comes to the financial world and cons and frauds and ripoffs. We had written quite a few pieces back in the day with the various different insurance salespeople with these ridiculous designations that they would have. You get out of a Cracker Jack box and they’d send out these mass
mass mailings to people and have a free lunch or dinner scam on our ice to call them basically putting people into equity index annuities and garbage financial products. But I guess there’s a couple loopholes here that advisors and I use that term loosely are using to bolster bolster their I guess their
their trustworthiness. right. Many people, they obviously, they’re looking into utilizing a financial advisor. Obviously, you’re looking at track record. You’re looking at who people have dealt with in the past. It’s, again, it’s an honesty and competence marketplace that people have to, they have to navigate through. And I get it.
A lot of the marketing, a lot of the marketing that we’re seeing right now being used, people in my industry, is misleading at best, at best. TV appearances that they didn’t make, they never happened. Articles they didn’t write. Books.
that they claim to have written that they had no part of whatsoever. Again, you got standards and ethics and they’re not meshing that well. Jason Zweig, Wall Street Journal, he called it trust washing. Yeah, I could come up with something else, quite frankly. This tarnishes the many advisors who deserve the public’s trust and the millions of people who could benefit from professional financial advice.
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They can’t tell for sure who is trustworthy. You can. You can. You just have to put a little bit of work in. You just have to put a little bit of work. You got lots of, and I looked at dozens of websites out there, featuring words as, as seen on and logos from ABC and CBS and Fox and CNBC and a myriad of other things.
that we’re dealing with all the time and quite frankly, they didn’t really appear. Zwei calls these various different things on their sites. He calls them trust badges. Online marketers charge a couple hundred dollars for them. Again, I couldn’t even believe this, quite frankly, and I looked into it. It’s true. These agencies, they write a press release
with material that is provided by the advisor. So in essence, the advisor writes a puff piece about himself. The agencies then, all you need to do is you need to put it out. You need to syndicate the press release for posting on a website, local TV station, whatever it may be. And it gets put on there, but buried somewhere. Not like everybody’s actually ever even seen it.
So were those advisors, they actually, did they actually get invited to go on any of these networks? Not so much. Not so much. But legally, the advisor get to say, hey, I was on Fox, and I was on this, and I was on that. Yeah. Again, this, one of these companies, it’s called Newswire NXT.com.
The CEO of the company says that consumers clearly understand that as seen on does not necessarily imply that the person or business was featured in an on air interview with the TV network. All right, sure. Anyway, there’s another organization here. You get a kick out of this one. The National Ethics Association says it vets members carefully and is devoted to aiding consumers with the increasingly complex test of
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Conducting due diligence on business professionals. Yeah, Zweig looked into this and I did as well. The advisors that are listed there on the National Ethics Association’s roster, yeah, not so ethical here. Among the advisors with the NEA seal of approval, seven were fired amid allegations of misconduct.
Seven were sanctioned by regulators for selling unregistered securities. Three who have been barred for life from the securities industry to state securities licenses have been revoked to file for personal bankruptcy. One with nearly two hundred thousand dollars in unpaid federal taxes. No, no, no. It’s not this great honor to be featured in the NEA as they’re telling people. Again, this is I can go on and on with all of these things. And this is nothing new.
Again, do your homework, people. Do your homework when it comes to hiring someone. Take a look into their background. There’s many different places you can go to. If they say that they were on a program or they’re getting invited on a program, whatever it may be, there probably is going to be some sort of YouTube evidence for that. Just again.
Be careful, I’m gonna sound like the, was it? The beginning of Hill Street Blues there, remember that? Just be careful out there. There’s a lot of Crooks and a lot of Connards. Let’s just leave it at that. Watchdogonwallstreet.com.
