April is Financial Literacy Month, and for its part the CFTC is urging Americans to look into the background of their financial professionals, officials say.
By highlighting the regulator’s SmartCheck.gov tool with an awareness campaign dubbed (SmartCheck Week), the CFTC aims to increase awareness of both the tool itself and the importance of due diligence when investing.
During the week of April 6-12, CFTC staff will urge investors to visit SmartCheck.gov and run a background check on their investment advisors through “advertising, social media and targeted outreach,” according to an Agency statement.
“If they are not careful, even experienced investors can be fooled by people who offer investment advice, but are actually not registered or licensed financial professionals,” says CFTC Chairman Timothy Massad, in a prepared statement. “With only 19 percent of investors reporting that they confirm an advisor’s certifications and only 17 percent checking for past violations, we encourage all investors to use the tools on SmartCheck.gov to check their financial advisors’ backgrounds before putting their hard-earned savings at risk.”
The national SmartCheck campaign was first launched in November 2014, and included an overhaul of the SmartCheck.gov website, officials say. The site provides tools to check the background of financial professionals, so that investors can identify “red flags that could signal that investors might be dealing with a fraudster,” the statement says.
“Investors now have ways to recognize the red flags that indicate a potential problem,” says CFTC Consumer Outreach Officer Michael Herndon, in a statement. “SmartCheck.gov provides a great tutorial on those red flags, as well as the tools investors need to follow up on them.”
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