‘Seminar’ highlights risks faced by investors

To show how easy it is to fall prey to an investment scam, the Alberta Securities Commission staged a fake investment seminar that promised attendees could “profit like the experts.”

Mid-way through the seminar, held Feb. 22 and attended by 22 prospective investors, an actor posing as “British-born financier” Jonathan Fisher — a persona created by the regulators along with his fake company Maple stock Investments — revealed the trickery.

“People continue to fall for investment schemes and we really felt we had to do something bold to get people’s attention,” Alison Trollope, the ASC’s director of investor education, said in an interview.

The commission now plans to broadcast a video of the faux seminar to get the lesson out to investors at large.

The ASC went to great lengths, tapping the annual budget for fraud prevention month to hire an agency to help design the ruse, print professionally designed stationary and business cards, targeting 165,000 people via social media including Facebook and Craigslist, and lay out a “free” lunch for prospective investors.

An event web page was created and visited by 8,500 people, and 48 registered for the fake seminar.

Trollope said the commission had some reservations about tricking people, and consideration was given to how angry some might be at being fooled by an agency that is there to protect their interests.

“Not only were we tricking people, but in a poor economic climate, we really don’t want to trick people,” she said.

But she noted that “real-life scam artists go to these extreme lengths all the time to convince people to hand over their hardearned money” and the regulator’s objective was “to show people how easy it is to appear legitimate.”

According to a 2016 study conducted by Innovative Research for the ASC, 5 per cent of Albertans reported having falling victim to investment fraud, although Trollope says the figure is probably higher because investors who get burned are often reluctant to report it.

Trollope said the ASC’s stunt didn’t get an angry response from the audience at the fake seminar. She added that there was a member of the regulator’s enforcement staff at each table to speak with attendees.

“The large majority of them thanked us,” she said. “We had planned for a lot of scenarios – that was one scenario we had not planned for.”