FSCA warns that scammers are impersonating financial services providers

The FSCA has warned consumers that individuals or entities are impersonating financial service providers and that they must take care and ensure that they are in fact transacting with the financial service provider and not the scammers.

The Financial Sector Conduct Authority (FSCA) says these individuals or entities fraudulently solicit investments from consumers by impersonating authorised financial services providers or claiming that they are associated with them.

The FSCA suspects they do this to lend a false sense of legitimacy to their fraudulent operations as the impersonators are not authorised to conduct financial services business. In fact, it is a criminal offence to conduct unauthorised business and against the law to impersonate other businesses or make false claims of association.

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Scammers usually use social media

The impersonators often use social media platforms to make investment or trading offers and the FSCA advises consumers to contact the authorised financial service provider directly to confirm that the offer is legitimate.

The FSCA says consumers must be extremely careful when dealing with investment or trading offers on social media platforms, as well as with unsolicited investment or trading offers on social media platforms.

Financial services business refers to people advising consumers on investing their funds and is often done in the form of offering investment opportunities. It also refers to people dealing with investments from consumers, including receiving funds, making investments on behalf of consumers and trading in any financial product for or on behalf of consumers or enabling consumers to trade in financial products.

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Here are some of the scammers

The FSCA made the list below of recent instances of impersonation to help consumers identify scammers. The impersonators are listed in the first column, the name of the legitimate authorised financial services provider in the second and the social media platform the impersonators use in the third column.

The legitimate businesses have confirmed that they are not in any manner associated with the impersonators.

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How to ensure you deal with the real company and not scammers

The FSCA says consumers should always check:

• that an entity or individual is authorised by the FSCA to provide financial products and services, including giving recommendations about how to invest
• the category of advice the person is registered to provide, as there are instances where companies or people are registered to provide basic advice for low-risk products and then offer advice on far more complex and risky products
• that the FSP number used matches the name of the FSP on the FSCA database. You can check here.

Consumers can also call the FSCA on its toll-free number at 0800 110 443 or do an online search for authorised financial institutions by license category here.