Regulatory investigation Ten customers were steered toward speculative, illiquid GWG L Bonds. Four other private-placement offerings moved forward without reasonable due diligence. FINRA’s settlement describes a brokerage whose procedures stated the rules but did not reliably turn them into supervision.…
Financial regulation · Customer complaints Customers wrote about frozen funds, missing account information, security incidents and ordinary service failures. FINRA found that Merrill Lynch’s survey-review system frequently failed to recognize those messages as reportable complaints. FINRA AWC No. 2024081776401 Accepted…
Regulatory Enforcement · Broker-Dealer Compliance Shared addresses, identical trade requests, investments far larger than customers’ stated resources and hundreds of unpreserved business messages: a FINRA settlement describes compliance controls that repeatedly failed to connect the dots. June 10, 2026 New…
TL;DR IFP Securities, a Tampa-based broker-dealer with 290 registered representatives and 140 branch offices, operated with a completely broken surveillance system from November 2022 through November 2025. After changing surveillance vendors in November 2022, the firm’s automated alert system failed…
Oppenheimer Sent 167,000 Fraudulent Bond Statements Over 18 Years TL;DR Oppenheimer & Co. sent an estimated 167,000 fraudulent account statements to over 800 customers between January 2006 and January 2024. The firm mislabeled risky private label collateralized mortgage obligations (CMOs)…
TL;DR World Investments, LLC operated 133 branches with 337 registered representatives and failed basic supervision requirements for 19 months. Between April 2022 and November 2023, the firm recommended over 150 deferred variable annuity exchanges without collecting or reviewing information required…
Liquidnet Rule 605 Violations 2018-2024 TL;DR Liquidnet, Inc., a Wall Street trading firm, published 74 fraudulent monthly reports from February 2018 through March 2024, covering 67 million orders. The firm misclassified orders requiring special handling as standard covered orders, corrupting…
TL;DR From January 2020 through December 2023, Chicago brokerage tastytrade systematically failed to report at least 71 written customer complaints to the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA). FINRA Rule 4530(d) requires quarterly reporting of customer grievances. tastytrade received the complaints…
Infinity Financial Services FINRA Annuity Fraud Settlement TL;DR Infinity Financial Services operated without any system to monitor how often its advisors were churning client retirement accounts through variable annuity exchanges from June 2019 to present. Between June 2019 and February…
TL;DR FINRA found that between January 2015 and December 2018, Ameriprise Financial Services failed to build a supervisory system to police recommendations that pushed customers out of one variable annuity and into a newer, more expensive one. Ameriprise reps steered…