Financial planner allegedly committed fraud, now what?

January 19, 2021 10:13 PM

I just found out that my financial planner allegedly stole money from one of his clients. Other than carefully reviewing my accounts, is there anything else I should be doing?

My former financial planner is this guy. In September I received an email from RBC notifying me that he would be "out of the office for a period of time". I have not received any other communication from them since. I found out about the fraud by randomly googling his name. Obviously the first thing I did was log into my accounts to review them; nothing seems amiss. But I'm wondering if there's anything else I should be doing, or if I should raise this with the bank.

More generally, how can I protect myself and my savings? I am not a knowledgeable investor or even very attentive to my accounts. I throw money into them and hope for the best. Other than say, reviewing my accounts once a month, is there anything else I should do?

posted by anonymous to Work & Money (7 answers total)

Change all of your passwords. I assume he had access to your accounts in order to manage them. Contact banks and brokers make sure you revoke that too.
posted by metahawk at 10:28 PM on January 19, 2021 [1 favorite]

I would contact RBC and your current advisor and ask them for information. I assume his access to your accounts would have gone through RBC backend and not through your passwords. But mainly I would ask them, what are THEY doing to protect you and prevent or quickly detect this kind of thing in the future?
posted by Lady Li at 11:51 PM on January 19, 2021 [3 favorites]

If it were me, I'd have someone independent with the relevant expertise look over my portfolio and accounts to see if anything looks off.

If problems are identified, IIROC is probably the applicable regulatory body. Some potentially relevant info here: https://www.iiroc.ca/investors/gettingyourmoneyback/Pages/default.aspx

If you do find you have been wronged it is also probably smart to talk to a lawyer, sooner than later in case limitation periods could be coming up.

I'm sorry you are dealing with this.
posted by AV at 3:46 AM on January 20, 2021

There's a possibility that you, say, deposited $1,000 and he only bought $900 of assets. It's relatively straightforward to check, but only if you have a complete record of deposits, purchases, and withdrawals. First, try to assemble a complete record of those. Then, just add them up and see if the totals match your current investments. If you don't feel comfortable doing that, you can ask a friend who's handy with a spreadsheet or hire an accountant. Once you've collected the data, it shouldn't be too time consuming. If you don't have access to that information, there's not much you can do, but there's a good chance that he targeted only vulnerable clients. Presumably you'd have noticed fraud on the scale described in the article.
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 6:25 AM on January 20, 2021 [1 favorite]

If hes your advisor and being investigated for fraud I would think the company would have an obligation to provide you with credit monitoring and investment portfolio monitoring services. They are liable as well if he has stolen anything.
posted by The_imp_inimpossible at 9:27 AM on January 20, 2021

I would ask the bank to pay for an independent forensic accountant to review your account.
posted by medusa at 6:06 PM on January 23, 2021

I would also talk to a lawyer.
posted by medusa at 6:07 PM on January 23, 2021