July 17, 2025

Episode 366: Avoiding Investment Scams

July 17, 2025

What happens when your favourite financial educator’s identity is hijacked by scammers? In this episode, Ben and Cameron pull back the curtain on a disturbing but increasingly common reality: sophisticated scammers using Ben’s name, voice, and online content to steal from unsuspecting investors. Ben breaks down exactly how these scams work—everything from fake WhatsApp investment groups and cloned emails to AI-generated voice notes and “pig butchering” scams that promise guaranteed returns. You’ll hear about pump-and-dump operations, shady PDFs full of financial nonsense, and how scammers prey on optimism, credibility, and fear of missing out.

Key Points From This Episode:

(0:04) Why the Rational Reminder podcast builds connections—and unintended consequences of trust

(1:58) The hidden value of the podcast’s reach: referrals and relationships that can’t be measured

(4:03) How a last-minute topic pivot turned into an urgent discussion on scams

(5:24) Why investment scams are more sophisticated—and dangerous—than ever

(6:16) AI voice clones and impersonation: How deepfakes make scams harder to spot

(9:26) Why specific scam education works better than general warnings

(12:29) Source credibility: Why scammers use trusted names to win trust fast

(15:23) Ben’s firsthand story of infiltrating a fake “Ben Felix” WhatsApp trading group

(19:57) Pump-and-dump in real time: How Ben tracked a fraudulent stock scam

(23:39) The email scam that used Ben’s name to pitch “secret” investments

(25:08) YouTube comment scams: the “fake advisor” trap and pig butchering explained

(31:15) How scammers use financial jargon that sounds smart—but means nothing

(34:52) The classic red flag: promises of guaranteed, high returns with zero risk

(41:23) Financial planning hot takes: unconventional views from the Rational Reminder Community

(49:44) Upcoming road trips and community meetups for Rational Reminder listeners

Read The Transcript:

Ben Felix: This is the Rational Reminder Podcast, a weekly reality check on sensible investing and financial decision making from two Canadians. We're hosted by me, Benjamin Felix, CIO and Cameron Passmore, CEO at PWL Capital.

Cameron Passmore: Welcome to episode 366. Just realized Ben that you can now listen to one episode every day and you can now start the second year of listening.

Ben Felix: That's kind of cool.

Cameron Passmore: That's actually quite remarkable how many people reach out that say, you know what, I've gone back and listened to all the episodes because people still do listen to episode one. I know we've said that many times, but it's still mind boggling, but 366 episodes.

Ben Felix: Yeah. We'll have to do something cool for episode 400.

Cameron Passmore: Well, we still have a little bit of time to plan and get some special guest on, I guess.

Ben Felix: I do want to mention before we jump into the content that we got a referral recently from another professional, which of course we always appreciate. We couldn't figure out the connections. Why did this person send us a client?

Super appreciative, obviously, but it's just like, huh, interesting. I wonder why. One of our portfolio managers who was involved with this potential client called this other professional just to be like, hey, I appreciate it, but why did you do that?

I don't think we know each other. It turned out it was because this other professional is a podcast listener, which is pretty cool. People do occasionally ask us whether this podcast, which we as listeners can appreciate and dedicate a lot of time to, the two of us and Dan and Matt, our producer and all the other people involved, whether it's worth it, whether it's worth that ongoing investment.

A lot of listeners will never become clients. Many of the people listening are professionals, DIY investors, but people that won't come to PWL for help themselves. But I think the fact that we're building asynchronous relationships with people around the world, including other professionals who while they may not become a client themselves, will make introductions like this person did is worth a ton.

It's hard to measure, but it is really valuable.

Cameron Passmore: It's the unintended consequences, which we've said all along. We often get asked or I get asked, how many clients do you get out of this? Well, that's great.

We do hear from a lot of people, but it's the unintended consequences that have been so amazing, like meeting great talent or having training tools for the team, having segments to share with clients or prospects that have questions. These are all the things that we didn't really think of when we started this seven years ago now. That's pretty cool.

It's interesting. I was listening to the Prof G pod this morning and he had a question because he does these AMAs talking about the amount of production that goes into their podcast and it made me think about the number of people that you're talking about, Ben, that it takes to put this on, finding guests, booking guests, all the post-production, the video work. There's a lot to it, but it's that flywheel.

You put it out, it connects with some people and they connect with other people and it starts to take on a life of its own, which is super interesting. You just never know who's listening and where they are.

Ben Felix: Totally. It's a cool thing to have for Matt, our producer who's listening now. It's a cool thing for him to be able to work on and all the other people that work on this thing because it's a fairly public brand, the podcast is, and Matt can tell us after we record if it's a cool thing to work on, but I'm guessing it is.

For advisors too, we had someone from our team, Phil Briggs, who's been on the podcast before. He came with like, hey, listen to this episode and I had this idea or I had this client situation that was relevant. It was a cool thing.

I was like, hey man, that's awesome. You should come on the podcast and talk about it. That'd be super valuable for people to hear.

He's like, oh, that's awesome. I love it. I don't know if rewarding employees is the right way to describe it, but it's just like a very cool thing for other people at our firm to be able to participate in.

Cameron Passmore: Yeah, when you're focused on impact, which our team is, it's great to share stories and create more impact for more people.

Ben Felix: Yeah, that's a great way to describe it.

Cameron Passmore: All right, go to the episode.

Ben Felix: Let's go.

Ben Felix: Fire away.

Cameron Passmore: This was something you had sort of in the can, I guess.

It's a bit of a scramble this week's episode. I don't know how you pulled this rabbit out of the hat, but you did.

Ben Felix: We had a recording with a guest planned for today and we will still have this guest come on, but they had a cold so they wanted to defer a bit of a scramble to prepare an episode for today. We had to record today because we have an employee summit later this week. We would have not had an episode if we didn't record today.

This is a topic that I had already written up for a video on my YouTube channel, so it wasn't too big of a deal to get an episode ready to go. The topic is, I guess people will know from reading the episode title before they started listening. It's about investment scams.

Not really in general, although we will make some general comments, but it's about scams specific to our content and even more specifically my content. A lot of these scams are perpetrated through my content channels, either impersonating me on Twitter, impersonating me by email.

Cameron Passmore: This is brutal.

Ben Felix: It is brutal. Using my YouTube channel to find people to try and scam and posting scam bait, I guess I call them comments on my YouTube channel. I'm just going to talk about some of the things that I'm seeing happening, hopefully help people avoid getting scammed themselves.

I think a lot of our listeners, I would guess, are on the savvier side, generally speaking, but if it helps them help someone else or identify something that may be happening to someone around them, then that's great. Obviously, if it helps someone listening, avoid getting scammed, that's even better.

Cameron Passmore: Do you find in general that your awareness of possible scams is higher now? I find now I'm much more skeptical, just in general, given all that's happening with AI.

Ben Felix: Well, yeah. I've got some comments on AI specifically. I think you got to be super, super careful.

I think that's always been true. I've seen people using AI to literally clone my voice to send someone a voice note in a direct message on Twitter, trying to convince them that they're me. Stuff like that's pretty scary.

If you, listener, are currently taking trading advice from me on WhatsApp or on Telegram, you're being scammed by someone impersonating me. If I've emailed you from a Gmail address, or I mean, honestly, from any email address to give you trading advice, which is not something that I give, you are, again, being scammed by someone impersonating me.

Cameron Passmore: Probably haven't listened to all 366 episodes.

Ben Felix: That is true. I think that's why a lot of people send me these scam attempts, because they do listen to our content and they know these are things that I would never say. They'll say, hey, someone who is clearly not you, based on what they're telling me, I see that a lot, which is why I think we know about a lot of these. A lot of our community is savvy enough to know that they're scam attempts.

Cameron Passmore: For sure.

Ben Felix: The other one is funny, but also not, because some people probably are being scammed by this. If you found your new financial advisor in the comment section of one of my videos, and they are earning you huge profits by trading crypto and stocks, you're being scammed.

I don't think it's possible. I really don't think it's possible, because a lot of these scammers operate in other countries, outside of Canada, where our legal system couldn't do anything anyway, or do much anyway. I don't think that they can be stopped, which is a sad state of affairs, but it is what it is.

Instead, we're going to talk about what these scams look like, what they're trying to accomplish, so that listeners can avoid them. These online investment scams are no joke in terms of the dollars. The Canadian Anti-Fraud Center data show that $310 million were reported lost to investment fraud in 2024, but they also estimate that 90% to 95% of fraud goes unreported.

The actual numbers lost to investment scams each year are likely enormous. That's from a report from the Canadian Securities Administrators. In that report, they also say that successful disruption of fraud requires intelligence that sheds light on the means and methods employed by criminals, which is exactly what we're going to try and do in this podcast episode.

I think that this is really important, this education about how the specifics of scams work is important, because this type of education has been shown to reduce the effectiveness of scams. There's a 2014 study that shows that consumers at a higher risk of being scammed, who were educated about one of two different scams. They've got high risk consumers who receive an education about one of two different scams.

That consumer later receives a staged scam phone call. A fake scammer, a scam scammer, if you will, but someone posing as a scammer calls them to pitch them on a scam. Now, those who had been warned about the specific scam that was later pitched to them were much less likely to respond to the scam than consumers who were forewarned about a different, unrelated scam.

That specific scam education is helpful. Now, the study does find that education about the other scam did still have a positive impact. It still reduced the effectiveness of the scam, but education about the specific scam was much more helpful.

That's why we're going to talk about these specific scams instead of just talking about generalities. Now, scammers are not very nice. I think everyone feels that who's been scammed or seen in a scam attempt.

Scammers are not very nice, but they're also not idiots. You can see it. I mean, I'll tell a story I've got later, but they're not idiots.

They also use techniques that leverage human emotions to build trust. We see that the most probably explicit or egregious or both example of that is the romance scams, which are just brutal, or grandparent scams. Those are also brutal, exploiting the care grandparents have for their grandchildren.

Cameron Passmore: We've seen them firsthand. It's incredible.

Ben Felix: It is incredible. Like the ones we just mentioned, they exploit points of weakness in their victims. One of the reasons that scammers impersonate someone like me is a technique called source credibility. They take advantage of the fact that people are more likely to believe others in a position of authority and to trust organizations that they perceive as legitimate.

By posing as Ben Felix, CIO at PWL Capital, that gives them the perception of legitimacy or credibility to their potential victims. They're leveraging, like we mentioned earlier, with the asynchronous relationship we have with our audience, scammers try and leverage that to take advantage of that trust that we have, which makes it then easier for them to perpetrate their scam, which is just brutal. This is not just happening to me, which of course makes sense.

Anyone with a little bit of credibility could have the same thing happen to them. David Rosenberg, who's a well-known financial commentator in Canada, he's been around forever, for as long as I've been around. He's kind of a perma bear.

His commentary is sometimes kind of funny. Anyway, he's a very well-known financial commentator, whether you agree with his commentary or not. He's recently gone public with an interview with a Globe and Mail talking about scams that had been using his name.

He's an economist and founder of Rosenberg Research. Anyone that follows finance or the economy in Canada has probably at least seen his name. He's pretty prominent.

What he said is that ads appearing on Facebook and Instagram starting in March were promoting a fake investment program, falsely listing him as its administrator. He had tried to report the fraud to authorities, including local police and the Canadian Anti-Fraud Center, but he said to the Globe and Mail that those reports largely went nowhere. He got some combination of frustrated and concerned and decided he was going to go public with what was happening to try and avoid people from getting scammed.

He told the Globe and Mail that since he went public with this, he's heard from several individuals who have lost money to this scam for a sum that he estimates is around $1 million so far from people that he's heard from, which is wild. In this case, the scam is a pump and dump. I've got another story about this later specific to me.

The scammers in this case were convincing investors to buy some obscure stock. They're saying, join the David Rosenberg trading program or whatever, which is not a real thing. Then they convince them to buy some penny stock or whatever.

You buy some amount of money in this super illiquid stock, what happens? The price goes up. The scammers say, look, see, our recommendation was right, you made money.

Then they convince the investor to invest more money in the stock saying that it's going to continue going up, which of course it does because it's a small illiquid stock. Then at some point when the price is high enough, so that's the pump, the first part, getting the price to go high. Then the scammer owns the stock.

That's an important piece here. They're pumping up the stock that they own by getting people to buy more shares of it. Then once the price is nice and high, the scammer sells their holdings, which causes, again, because it's a small illiquid stock, it causes the price to dump.

Just a classic pump and dump.

Cameron Passmore: You pump, they dump.

Ben Felix: Yeah, exactly.

I've got a pretty crazy story about that. I mean, not that crazy, but an interesting story about that in a bit. That's source credibility.

The scammers also use social proof, another one of the techniques that they leverage. We see this in the YouTube comments example that I'll describe later, where they create the perception that a lot of people have had a great experience with a fake financial advisor to try and convince some unsuspecting victim who reads those comments to engage with that fake financial advisor. The scammers also play on common behavioral biases.

They play on optimism bias where people overestimate the probability of good outcomes and underestimate bad ones. Going and make a bunch of money with this advisor, with this trading scheme. The halo effect where people quickly trust someone based on a positive first impression.

That's probably also related to the other ones that we just mentioned with the credibility. Present bias where people tend to maximize short-term pleasure, like the potential for a big investment game without fully considering the potential consequences. Regret aversion where people worry about missing out on something like a big investment opportunity.

Representativeness where people extrapolate general conclusions from specific data points, like the recent returns of an individual stock. That's like the pump and dump example where scammers will say, look, the stock went up. The victim is like, great, but it's not real.

I mean, it is, but it's part of the scheme. Before I get into the specifics of the scams that I've seen with respect to my content, I do want to say that I like you guys, you listeners. I appreciate you listening to our podcast and watching my videos, but it is extremely unlikely that I will contact you unless you're a client of PWL Capital.

Even then, it's rare. I don't have a lot of direct contact with clients at this point. We have teams of financial planners and portfolio managers who do an incredibly good job, better than I could do, dealing directly with our clients.

I am not one of those people. I'm the CIO, as people know from the introduction. If I do reach out to you, it will be from my PWL email address and it will not be to give you trading advice or to tell you to sign up for a shady investment platform.

There are three main scams related to my YouTube content and this podcast, I guess just to my identity in general. There's investment group scams, which is similar to the Rosenberg one that I had mentioned earlier. There are email impersonation scams that I've seen, and there are fake financial advisor pig butchering scams.

These are all either using my name or using my YouTube channel. The Rational Reminder Podcast comment section gets these scam comments too. They're just a bit easier to deal with because there aren't as many of them on my YouTube channel.

It's honestly, other than turning comments off completely, I don't know how to stop them or having a full-time employee that is only dedicated to removing scam comments.

Cameron Passmore: Can you tell if they're all connected?

Ben Felix: There's no way to tell.

Cameron Passmore: You can't tell by any signals? Interesting.

Ben Felix: I can recognize them within a second when I see them because they follow a similar pattern. I'll talk about that in a minute. But can an unsuspecting scam victim who just happens to stumble across one of my videos and scroll through the comments?

I mean, I would assume that anybody who's spending a lot of time on finance YouTube has gotten used to seeing these scam comments and probably can identify them, but I guess it doesn't take very many people not to be able to for the scammers to be successful. We'll start with investment group scams. These are typically conducted on encrypted chat platforms like Telegram and WhatsApp.

To start here, I'm not on Telegram at all. I do use WhatsApp to stay in touch with some of my friends, but I am not texting you on WhatsApp unless you're one of my close friends and I'm not on Telegram at all. If you're in a Telegram group or otherwise communicating with me on Telegram, you are 100% talking to a scammer because I'm not there at all whatsoever.

Honestly, same as WhatsApp. You know if I'm talking to you on WhatsApp because you're one of my very close friends, I don't use it very much. It's just an easy way to stay in touch with some of my American friends when I played basketball and a few of my Canadian friends, but I don't use that platform very much and I don't use it at all for any professional activities.

These groups are posted online. They're shared online and they're run by accounts that use the profile picture and name of someone credible, in this case, me. What they do is they promise to include you in a community that's focused on trading stocks or crypto based on what they call research.

Again, leveraging, you're getting Ben Felix's research or you're getting David Rosenberg's research and they say that you're going to earn high returns by following the advice. I was sent a link to one of these WhatsApp groups. It was actually another Canadian advisor called me and was like, hey, I wanted to talk to you about an investment group that one of my clients was involved with.

I knew immediately what it was going to be about. He told me that they'd joined this group and there were a bunch of people in there and that I was giving advice. I was like, okay, it's not me.

I get impersonated a lot, whatever. The guy was like, okay, good. I was hoping that's what you were going to say because either you were going to say that or I was going to tell you that you're going to jail.

I was like, listen, I appreciate you calling, but there's not much that I can do about it. That phone call is why I decided to do a video on this topic. I want to do something to address that.

Real people, a Canadian person who's the client of a Canadian advisor who was able to find the real me and call me was in an investment group run by someone pretending to be me.

Cameron Passmore: Wow.

Ben Felix: Which is pretty scary.

I asked the advisor that had called me to send me the link to the group because the client had sent it to him. I joined the group and I was contacted eventually, took a while, by one of the group admins and they were using my name and my picture. Such a surreal thing.

I was kicked out of the group too. I didn't use my real name or phone number, but I was kicked out of the group. I asked why.

They had a whole story about how they had to verify who I was and this group is only for their friends or something like that. Eventually, I convinced them that I was a potential scam victim and they were willing to engage after that. When I joined the group, before I got kicked out of the group, it was open to join, but then I got booted.

There were 90 people in it. I don't know if those robots are real people, but I flipped through them. They looked to me like real people.

They all had Canadian phone numbers. This was terrifying. If that is the case, there are 90 people in this WhatsApp group being scammers.

Really wild stuff.

Cameron Passmore: Could you call them out?

Ben Felix: No. In the group, before I was kicked out, you could only view posts from the admins. You couldn't post yourself.

I could have gone through each of those individual phone numbers before I'd gotten kicked out of the group and contacted them. I didn't know if they were bots or who's a scammer and who's not. Then once I got kicked out of the group, I didn't have anybody's number anymore.

They contacted me. At first, I was like, did they figure out who I am? I just didn't know why I wasn't hearing from anyone, but eventually they did contact me through a direct message and chatted for a bit.

At first, they were super standoffish, but then when they thought I might be a victim or a potential victim, they started asking me about my investing and what I do, whatever. I said, just whatever basic stuff. I said I was struggling and looking for advice.

They say they do rigorous research and eventually they pitched me on this specific stock.

Cameron Passmore: This is all in your name?

Ben Felix: This person is using my name. Yes.

Cameron Passmore: They're pitching you using your name. That's hilarious.

Ben Felix: Yeah. I'm not telling them that I'm me, obviously. My picture and my name.

I still have their contact information in WhatsApp. I think they have my old title, head of research at PWL Capital.

Cameron Passmore: That's nuts.

Ben Felix: It is nuts. The whole experience was pretty surreal. Eventually, they pitched me on a specific stock.

It's this obscure small cap stock. I'm pretty sure it's the same thing as the Rosenberg scam where they're going to convince me to buy this small liquid stock to pump the price so they can sell their holdings at an inflated value, causing the price to decline.

Cameron Passmore: You didn't do your own pump and your own dump?

Ben Felix: Well, I thought about do I actually do this? Do I actually buy the stock? I didn't want to go that far.

I don't know what other layers there are. At some point, the guy asked me to send a statement. I don't know if there's identity theft angle to this too.

At first, now eventually, the guy turned on me. I started saying, I live close to one of your offices. Why don't I just stop by?

He got mad, started using profanity and told me to screw off basically.

Cameron Passmore: That's nice of him or her.

Ben Felix: Before, when they were trying to scam me, before they realized that I probably wasn't a good target, they were super smooth, super nice.

Toronto phone number, using my name and picture as mentioned. They wrote perfectly. I don't know if they're using chat GPT or what.

Perfect grammar, articulate. If I didn't know factually that I was talking to someone impersonating me, the person would have based on their writing and based on what they were saying, they might've seemed credible. A scary thing for PWL is that they, not to me, but to the other advisor that alerted me to this situation, had done the same thing and talked to the scammer.

The scammer had offered them up the PWL Capital website when he asked where they worked. It's brutal. I would hope that this goes without saying, but it clearly needs to be said because these scammers are still doing this.

Nobody has the ability to consistently identify stocks that will have high returns in the future. Trading individual stocks is extremely risky as we covered in detail in a recent episode. Anyone confident in their ability to generate high returns from stock trading, that alone should be a big red flag, but especially if they want to share those high returns with you on WhatsApp.

The rare talent, they are out there. We just had that episode with Martin Kramers. Those people are out there.

The rare talent that is able to profit consistently in financial markets is not on WhatsApp or Telegram, sending their trading strategies to internet strangers. In this case, I followed the stock. I added the stock to my stocks app and I was just tracking it.

It didn't do much. They had given some ridiculous price target. It did go up after they had told me to buy it.

I never actually bought it, but it did go up a bit. I can see the date that that group was created. I looked at from the date the group was created until some future date, the price went up a ton.

Then last week, it dropped 70% in a day. You can see this thing happening in real time. The group gets created, the stock gets pumped, and then the stock dumps.

It's crazy. Clearly, because the pump and dump price action happened, somebody was scammed somewhere. It's brutal.

That's trading group scam. Email impersonation scams, this is people sending emails to people posing as someone else. In my example, someone posing as me was reaching out to people who had commented on my videos.

This one's also brutal. If you comment on my video, your YouTube profile is visible. Some people have their email address available in their YouTube profile.

The scammer is going through YouTube comments, clicking on people's profiles, seeing if their email address is visible, and then sending them emails. It's brutal. Again, it's like using my content and channel and my name to try and scam people.

In this case, the email was thanking the viewer for their engagement on my YouTube channel and inviting them to chat. It's ridiculous. Again, I appreciate people watching my videos and commenting on my videos very much.

I will not send you an email thanking you for commenting. If I do, it won't be from a Gmail address, but I won't. I just won't do that.

Cameron Passmore: You just won't.

Ben Felix: This one, one of the people who had received this scam email replied initially because they weren't sure if it was actually me or not. At first, they said they thought it was pretty cool.

Then the second email, it started to get fishy. They replied and the scammer sent a follow up offering to share a comprehensive walkthrough, including actionable steps, key insights from the latest research, and some of the most promising investment opportunities with strong potential for returns. Again, all the hallmarks of a scam.

I would guess this was another pump and dump just based on the promising investment opportunities comment, but this one I never followed up on because the email address it was being used was reported to and shut down by Google, which is great. I mentioned earlier, but I do want to mention again that on impersonation, so that was an email, but I have heard from people who've gotten DMs, Twitter DMs with voice notes using my voice, an AI impersonation of my voice trying to convince people of my identity. They could probably do it with video too.

I've seen great realistic video avatars. If I ever DM you a video trying to convince you to buy a specific stock, you should know it's not me. These scams are all bad, brutal, but this last one drives me completely nuts.

The YouTube comment section, fake financial advisor, I'm pretty sure pig butchering scam. I'll talk about what that is later. They drive me completely nuts because they will not go away.

Every time I see them, when I'm reading through YouTube comments, I report them and block the user, but it doesn't matter because they're just going around. They go and create computer generated usernames and accounts and it's just impossible to stop them.

Cameron Passmore: Is this like automatic fraud that's going on or is there someone behind it, do you think?

Ben Felix: Oh, there's someone behind it, 100%. I don't know who or where or how they're doing it, but someone somewhere is doing it. I interact with them.

This is another one where I followed up on the scam to see what was going on here. These ones, in many cases, they're identifiable easily because they're very general comments. It'll start off with a very generic statement, but I have seen some more recently that are very specific to their content, like the one on individual stock risk that we did recently.

There are some of these scam comments, they'll have a few words or sentences that are related to the video and then they get into the scam content. They're still usually pretty generic. They often reference either a loss, I lost $200,000 or a specific dollar amount that they've achieved.

I just hit $3 million or whatever. I didn't dig into the psychology there, but I'm guessing there's some psychology behind mentioning those specific dollar amounts because they all seem to do that. Clearly, the scammers have figured out some psychology related to that.

It must be working or they wouldn't be doing it. Here's one example, one of these scam comments. You can see how generic it is.

This is a quote from the scam comment. This video really hit home for me. Retirement has been such a rewarding chapter of my life.

My wife and I worked hard to get here and we're incredibly thankful for where we are today. Now we're debt-free with a net worth of over $3 million. There's the specific dollar number and that investment income supports us every week.

Now, this was on my video on the historical comparison of renting versus owning in Canada. In this case, it's not at all relevant to the content. It's just super generic.

If you're reading through the comments and you see this, you might wonder how this person was so financially successful. This is where their so-called financial advisor comes in. It's always a very specific full name.

I think it's because links are typically caught in YouTube spam comment filters. I have a filter where any link can't be posted. It'll automatically get flagged.

I never check the flag comments. If it's got a link, it's gone. It's never going to see the light of day.

The scammers figured that out. They don't post links. They post full names, first, middle, and last name of the supposed advisor.

Because then when you go and search it on Google, you're not going to get a whole bunch of hits. What they do is they make a website using that full name. Searching that name brings you to a website.

That website is going to list credentials, testimonials, awards, licenses, and all that kind of stuff, all fake. One really tricky thing that they do though, and I haven't validated that they'd always do this, but I have looked at a few where they did do this. They'll use the name of an actual registered investment professional so that the name shows up in registration searches.

These are mostly US so it'll be like FINRA, but they'll link out to FINRA broker check. They'll have this fake scam website with fake contact information and everything like that, but you can click on the FINRA broker check link and it'll take you to the actual page for the real advisor with this name. Super, super sneaky.

Cameron Passmore: The name's not fake. The person is fake.

Ben Felix: Correct.

They're just impersonating a real person. That specifically, likewise with using my name, I guess, is really problematic because one of the things that you can always do, we've said this in the podcast many times, Cameron, if you want to verify whether someone offering you investment advice is legitimate, you can look them up on a regulatory website. You can see if they are registered to give investment advice.

In Canada, we have are theyregistered.ca so you can search for the registration of anyone registered with securities regulators in Canada. In the case of this fraudulent advisor or my WhatsApp and email impersonator, that stuff doesn't really help. You want to look me up and yeah, I'm real, I'm registered, but if you're not talking to the real me, it doesn't help.

What I would say is that professional financial advisors will probably not communicate with you through WhatsApp or Telegram or an email address that is not associated with a registered firm. If in doubt, if you go to aretheyregistered.ca and look me up or look Cameron up, you'll see the contact information with the securities regulator for PWL Capital, call that phone number and verify whether whatever interaction you're having is legitimate. Now, after years of seeing these comments, I recently decided I would contact one and see what happens.

I went on this fraudulent website and again, if anyone's concerned about security, I did use a throwaway email address from a privacy focused email provider so I'm not concerned about them finding the real me. I reached out to one of these fake advisors and just said like, hey, I saw your name online, just wondering how this works, something like that. They asked me if I've ever worked with a financial advisor before, they asked me what active trading accounts I have, they asked my annual income and whether I'm an aggressive or reserved investor, the purpose of my investment and my investment budget.

Pretty detailed. I replied and they told me that they're taking their next batch of clients in Q2 2025 and that I could join that batch to begin investing and earning. The pitch was that they are a multi-market broker that trades across three different markets while majoring in digital currencies, of course.

I said I was interested, of course, and they sent me a PDF detailing the offering and again, if anyone's concerned about security, I did not open the PDF, I only previewed it through that secured privacy focused email provider, didn't download it. For anyone not aware, PDFs can contain malicious code. I have no idea what the actual scam is, is it to get me to download the PDF?

Well, I didn't do that but it is worth being careful because PDFs can contain viruses and malicious code. Now this PDF that I received, it is honestly incredible. It's like a masterclass in what to look out for in an investment scam.

Sorry for this word, Cameron. It contains huge amounts of financial bullshit. Now if anyone, Cameron included, cringes at me using that word.

Cameron Passmore: Good.

Ben Felix: It is defined in a 2022 academic paper, Individual Differences in Susceptibility to Financial Bullshit as seemingly impressive verbal financial assertions that are presented as true and meaningful but are actually meaningless. Listen to this.

This is wild to read. This is the explanation of the trading strategy from this advisor. Are you ready?

Cameron Passmore: Fire away.

Ben Felix: Strap in. Okay.

The quid pro quo strategy functions through a simple economic law of substitute of goods where if goods A and goods B are substitutes, a decrease in demand of goods A will result to an increase in demand for goods B. Similarly, taking into consideration the stock market and digital currency market are both substitutes as the, typo there, as the offer similar services in the financial market, the economic law of substitutes will equally apply. Now those words assembled in that way mean absolutely nothing, but they could sound smart and hilariously, on this page of this PDF brochure, they have that trading strategy and then underneath it with no explanation for why, they've got a whole bunch of pictures of stock charts that happened to have gone up over some period of time.

It's just completely ludicrous. That type of text and the stocks going out probably do act as a filter where people without the financial knowledge to realize that it's bullshit are prime candidates for being scammed. This PDF also includes another classic scam attribute.

It promises guaranteed profit without risk. Now, of course, most investors want to earn high returns, but they're concerned about losing money. The reality in financial markets, as listeners know, is that if you want the expectation of earning higher returns, you need to be willing to take more risk.

Diversification can certainly mitigate the risk of total loss like you get with an index fund. Unlikely for a total market index fund to go to zero, but even the broadly diversified equity index fund can go through double digit percentage point drops pretty regularly and it may take years to recover. Although that hasn't been the recent experience, but historically there have been many drawdowns that lasted for a very long time.

That's just the reality of investing in risky assets, but humans find losses painful. We've talked about many of these in the podcast. There are lots of overpriced and otherwise suboptimal financial products that prey on this concern by promising investors downside protection.

In this case, the advisor is offering a guaranteed monthly profit. Listen to this, between 5% and 10% depending on the amount of investment capital and whether you choose a passive or aggressive investment approach.

Cameron Passmore: Can you imagine?

Ben Felix: I know. Let's take a moment with that information. If we take the lower end, 5% per month, so that must be for the passive approach, not the aggressive one.

I don't know. That's an annual return of 80%, which is pretty good for context on how good that is. The most successful hedge fund in history, or at least one of them, one of the most publicly known ones, the Renaissance Technologies Medallion Fund, which has been closed, by the way, to outside investors since 1993, has annualized historical returns around 66% before fees and 40% after fees, at least as of when Greg Zuckerman, who we've had in this podcast, wrote his book, The History of that Fund and Its Performance. Now, I would say that it is implausible that Daisy on YouTube, who's the name of the commenter that wrote the comment we were talking about earlier, has just happened to find something better than the Renaissance Technologies Medallion Fund and is excited to tell you about it in a YouTube comment.

Actually guaranteed returns, properly guaranteed, at least in nominal terms, available through guaranteed investment certificates in Canada or certificates of deposit in the US are way lower. Canadian banks' GIC rates, depending on how long you're locking in for, are in the 3% to 4% range, last time I checked. They're not 80%.

Other than the guaranteed 80% returns, the other big red flag with this one is the claim that there's no downside risk. They're guaranteeing the 5%, but the PDF also says that the broker has an alternative insurance that covers for any losses incurred while trading for a client.

Cameron Passmore: Wow. That's impressive.

Ben Felix: Should the profit realized in a month fall below the agreed percentage, this insurance will also make up the deficit. Now, that, of course, is not a real thing.

Cameron Passmore: People fall for this. Amazing.

Ben Felix: They must.

The PDF finishes with a benefits of working with this advisor that remind me of the scene from Step Brothers where they pitch prestige worldwide. You know what I'm talking about?

Cameron Passmore: Been a long time.

Ben Felix: It's ridiculous. They say all these loosely related financial and business terms. This document finishes with something similar where it's like retirement, mortgages, crowdfunding, investment advising, tax avoidance, college funds.

It's just hilarious. For the record real quick, tax avoidance is not something a credible financial planner is going to offer to anyone. Tax minimization stems from good financial tax planning, but tax avoidance is inconsistent with the overall spirit of the law.

Just another little red flag there. I was, of course, interested in signing up for these 80% returns. I asked for the next step after getting that PDF.

I was sent another PDF requesting a huge amount of personal information and I was told to sign up for three different trading platforms. Two of them were actual trading platforms. One was a crypto platform, one was a stock trading platform.

One of them was an extremely sketchy, presumably fraudulent trading platform. It was explained to me that how this works is that the advisor would be copy trading my accounts. The next step would have been for me to open these accounts, add money to them, but I didn't actually go to that step because I didn't actually want to get scammed.

Cameron Passmore: What do you mean by copy trading?

Ben Felix: They're trading in their accounts and then my accounts are set up in a way that copies the trades that they're making.

Cameron Passmore: They've got trading authority on your account?

Ben Felix: I didn't dig into that. She was posing as a woman. They told me that they wouldn't have control of my accounts, but they would be copy trading.

I didn't get this far to see how the mechanics would actually work. What would have happened, I think, based on my knowledge of scams is that the fraudulent account, the sketchy platform that they told me to sign up for, would have likely accrued large profits, the appearance of large profits. I would have been asked to add more money to that account, likely with a promise of doing so, it would increase my returns.

Then that would continue until I wanted to withdraw funds, at which point you realize that you've been scammed. Then at that point, it's too late. That's the pig butchering scam.

They build trust, convince you that you're earning large profits, get you to add more funds, and then take you to slaughter. I don't know. What do you think so far?

Cameron Passmore: It's all crazy. It's amazing to me that people fall for this.

It's amazing that you could actually set up an account on a legitimate platform and it doesn't get caught somehow. That's amazing to me.

Ben Felix: You mean like that you can set it up on YouTube?

Cameron Passmore: No, no. That you could set up a legitimate account on some trading platform and someone else is doing copy trades on that account in your name. You need to find out what the mechanics are because there's certain know your client regulations that we all have to follow.

Ben Felix: I don't know if they would have actually done anything, the legitimate accounts, maybe all the fraudulent activity would have happened in the sketchy account.

Cameron Passmore: Exactly. In the other account.

Ben Felix: I didn't get that far. Maybe someone with expertise in scams can tell us what would have happened next.

Cameron Passmore: It's so interesting that there's people out there that could fall for this under your likeness because if you're a regular listener or follower of your material, you would know that it's not possible. Obviously, there's enough brand credibility around you. You're right.

All it takes is one. One person falls for it for enough money. It's all worthwhile.

Just keep hunting for the person who's going to put in a million bucks or whatever amount of money. It's still mind boggling to me. That's my earlier comment about I go to so much now with this assumption that it's a fake.

It's so hard to tell now what's real and what's fake.

Ben Felix: It's brutal. Scams are unfortunately part of life. They've been around forever and they're not going anywhere.

As I mentioned earlier, it seems to be next to impossible to stop them. One of the best defenses against scams, as we mentioned earlier, is knowledge of scams. If you know what the scammers are trying to do, you'll be able to avoid getting sucked into their traps.

Unfortunately, the people who most need to hear this information will probably never listen to this episode. To address this, one of the relatively recent regulatory innovations in Canada designed in part to stop scams is the Trusted Contact Person or TCP. Right now in Canada, licensed portfolio managers and investment advisors are required to ask.

It's not a requirement for the client to have one, but you're required to ask the client to name a trusted contact person. That is a person that the client authorizes to be contacted if their advisor is concerned that the client is being financially exploited, among a few other reasons, like if they're unable to contact them for some other reason. The trusted contact person, they don't have authority to trade in your accounts or give any orders or anything like that, but they are a third party that you, the client, trust that the advisor can contact if they have concerns.

I would say that if a listener or a close family member of a listener or a client of PWL is working with an advisor, which obviously a client would be, and does not have a trusted contact person, we likely would have asked you if you would like to have one. If you don't have one, I think it's definitely worth having just as a safeguard for stuff like this. For elderly clients, and we talked about this with Rob Carrick about how they're being often underserved by the financial industry, just with the complexity of being able to actually contact someone, I think particularly in that case, having a trusted contact person is a really nice additional layer of protection.

Cameron Passmore: I agree.

Ben Felix: That's it on scams.

Cameron Passmore: Be aware and be skeptical.

Ben Felix: Be skeptical. Talking to the scammers on WhatsApp, talking to the scammers by email, it's brutal. It's awful.

Cameron Passmore: All right. You wanted to talk about financial planning hot takes.

Ben Felix: There was a topic created in the Rational Reminder community that took off, at least by Rational Reminder community standards. It's got 161 comments as of earlier today, and it's probably a lot higher now, in three days since it was posted. The original post was from Tala in the community.

They asked the community, what are your high conviction thoughts in finance slash financial planning that go against convention? I'll read some of the earlier comments in this thread that had a lot of engagement, a lot of likes and other reactions. I do apologize if there are any banger comments later on in the thread that I didn't get to.

I don't know how far I read down, maybe halfway down. Here we go. Cherno Kix, who's one of our wonderful moderators in the community, said, this is his hot take.

One should be more active in their bond portfolio when they reach retirement and reject modern portfolio theory for something more akin to liability driven investment. I think that's pretty good. I wouldn't disagree.

We talked to Peter Mladina about that pretty extensively. John Cochrane and Robert Merton would probably agree. It doesn't mean it's always practically feasible, but I think as a concept, it makes a lot of sense.

Liberte45 said, if we agree that the goal of a government is to do things for the collective better than each individual could do on their own, it's reasonable to expect governments to care for retirees properly. They said, I don't think financial planning should have this much market share. I don't think it should have three pillars or should I say, I think the average person shouldn't need the third pillar, which is personal savings to retire.

Government program should cover 70% to 80% of wages with appropriate contributions, of course, and not their current levels. If I could resume in a sentence, I think they mean if I could reduce this to a sentence, I don't think the average worker should be able to understand Ben in order to retire in safety and dignity. It's pretty good.

Cameron Passmore: That's a powerful comment.

Ben Felix: And Canada's unique like that. I remember the first time that I talked to people from Germany who had come to Canada, they were a little bit perplexed at our system. People in Germany don't worry about this stuff as much.

I don't know the details, but I guess their government pension scheme is more robust. Maybe a German person will correct me or maybe the people that I met from Germany, I don't know, weren't typical, but I just thought that was interesting that they were like, yeah, this is not something people talk about that much in Germany. Having said that, a lot of people from Canada might give the same impression if they went to Germany and started talking to people, but they might not know much about investing either.

Asterix Legault said they have a few different hot takes here. Don't have more than one-third of your portfolio in one country. This is obvious to me to avoid concentrating risk in one set of institutions, one currency, one leader, et cetera.

His convention is catching up though with US underperformance. He's obviously saying having more than a third of your portfolio in the US might not make sense. Next one is emerging markets should have higher expected returns because of higher risk.

That's not borne out by data. Asterix Legault is convinced that it must be true. Insurance, this is also Asterix Legault, you should have as little as possible.

Only the most catastrophic risks should be insured. I would say for someone who's younger and working and not financially independent, well, disability in life, those are pretty catastrophic. If you have a portfolio of 100K plus and you're relatively young, any risk under 100K does not need to be insured.

I mean, vehicle insurance, you have to have. House insurance is probably more than 100K most of the time. Life and disability unless you're financially independent or not planning to earn money anymore are probably more than that.

I don't know what he's talking about then.

Cameron Passmore: Like waiving liability on your car or keeping liability but waiving the collision on your car perhaps. Write the car off but if you end up causing serious injury to somebody else.

Ben Felix: Or warranties on stuff that you purchase.

Cameron Passmore: Wherever you're buying your toaster when you get offered.

Ben Felix: That's probably good advice in general. Asterix Legault also has his obligatory SUVs and pickup trucks are a scourge that needs to be eradicated.

Cameron Passmore: That's a hot take. A lot of people would not agree with that.

Ben Felix: It's an ongoing theme from Asterix Legault in the Rational Reminder community saying that SUVs are just this symbol of overconsumption. Def Patek's hot take was disciplined saving is 10 times more important than investment costs, which are 10 times more important than returns. Interesting one.

Nett N-E-T-T said five different hot takes. People would rather appear loudly rich than quietly wealthy. It's pretty good.

They said I used to think people with nice cars or trucks were wealthy. Now I just think they're indebted up to their eyeballs and stuck with a depreciating asset that no longer satiates their hedonistic tendencies. Homeowners have no idea how much owning a house costs.

Cameron Passmore: Absolutely.

Ben Felix: Yeah, I agree with that one. All they see is the purchase figure and sold figure.

No other costs are assessed, tracked or calculated. That's pretty good. Investing should be boring.

These are great. These aren't hot takes. Credit cards are great for points slash incentives if you pay the credit card off regularly and do not incur interest charges.

Cameron Passmore: Agree.

Ben Felix: AJLKMNJ says a hot take that alienates everyone. Broad participation in index funds for the general public with voting shares is a safer way for workers to own the means of production than many proposed forms of socialism.

Cameron Passmore: It's interesting.

Ben Felix: I guess you have to be able to accumulate shares in index funds.

Cameron Passmore: True.

Ben Felix: Index funds don't let you control the votes, I don't think. Although I think Vanguard piloted something or is piloting something that lets unit holders vote. Robert T., who's always insightful in the Rational Reminder Community says a few things here. They're all good though. Start with determining how much you need and when you need it and then align savings and portfolio choice to those needs. Most people, including on this forum in the Rational Reminder Community, don't seem to do this.

They just start with fund the selection. Likely true and I agree.

Cameron Passmore: That's how much of this industry is predicated.

Ben Felix: 100%.

Cameron Passmore: All kinds of products. When you and I go to conferences, it's all about the product providers.

Ben Felix: Start with a product.

Cameron Passmore: The margins in the product.

Ben Felix: Well, that's the thing with conferences is they're funded by the product providers because like you said, the margins in the product. This is still Robert T. Supersizing your lifestyle, including house cars, can undersize your savings.

A quarter of physicians in their 60s have a net worth less than $1 million. 11% to 12% have a net worth less than $500,000. A person down the street pays $129,000 in property taxes per year just to live in their supersized home.

Avoid the urge to keep up with the Jones. He's got links in his post to data supporting those claims. The largest tail of risk in your portfolio is non-market risk, severe health conditions, slash accidents, et cetera, and associated medical expenses in the US or divorce.

Another really interesting one. The largest tail of risk in your portfolio is non-market risk. When an investment is labeled dead, it usually is not.

Equities, international value bonds, we've talked about that before. Patience is the ultimate alpha. Patience is hard, endless tinkering and fund flip-flopping is easy.

Savings and tax management are under appreciated determinants of overall portfolio size. More effort seems to be spent on fund selection, but spending time on improving skills slash earnings and savings rather than tinkering with fund selection has a higher return on time spent. Tax management, including optimizing use of tax advantage accounts and investment options can significantly reduce tax costs.

Tax efficiency and taxable accounts usually means inactivity. Like that. Love this last one.

This is the last one we'll read. Complexity does not equal sophistication.

Cameron Passmore: Hear, hear.

Ben Felix: Wall Street tries to sell complexity as sophistication. Who wants to be unsophisticated, just like who wants dumb beta? There is a tendency for people as they age with all their worldly lived experience to simplify as the ultimate sophistication.

There is some wisdom in that.

Cameron Passmore: I agree with that totally.

Ben Felix: Nice.

Cameron Passmore: Great list.

Ben Felix: Cool topic. Like I said, it was at 161 replies last time I looked. I would guess that it has increased pretty significantly since then.

If people want to check it out, of course, it's at community.rationalreminder.ca. You do have to apply. The mod team is pretty good about getting approvals done fairly quickly, but I think there's just under 12,000 people in there now. I occasionally read LinkedIn, Twitter, Personal Finance Canada on Reddit, but the discussions that happen in the Rational Reminder community, there's nothing else like that on the internet that exists in the world.

I'm comfortable saying that, which is crazy to say.

Cameron Passmore: You and I are going on the road to meet some people. We're going to try to do it in August, but the dates didn't work out. We'll be in Vancouver on the 15th to the 17th of September, and probably on the island as well in Victoria.

If you're in one of those areas, drop us a note. We're easy to find. We'll let you know what sort of thing we're going to be setting up.

Probably be a Rational Reminder meetup of some sort. Then if you're advised in one of those cities and you want to meet one-on-one, let us know and we can certainly organize that because we are looking to get people on our team from different centers across the country. After that, I think you and I will be hitting the road more often to different cities, which will be super fun.

Ben Felix: Yeah, it will be super fun.

Cameron Passmore: Since I've been putting out those LinkedIn notes, I'm hearing from so many people. It's interesting how many people, I guess the term is lurkers, that follow us, listen to podcasts that say, well, I finally decided to reach out because of whatever the situation might be.

Ben Felix: I would also say that particularly for this topic where you're saying to people, hey, reach out if you want to talk about joining PWL, of course, they're going to be anonymous and quiet about it because it's an employment issue. They'd be potentially leaving an existing employer to come to PWL. I've talked to a lot of people who I would not have guessed had been reading your LinkedIn posts who have reached out to me to talk based on your LinkedIn posts.

It's a very interesting little dynamic there where you're striking some kind of nerve where people are reading what you're posting and they're interested and they want to talk, but they're understandably very quiet about it.

Cameron Passmore: Reach out and hopefully we'll see you in beautiful BC, back to your home part of the country.

Ben Felix: My home part of the country. It's not formalized yet. Do you remember years ago I did that hike in Newfoundland?

Cameron Passmore: Yep.

Ben Felix: I might go and do that again in August.

Cameron Passmore: Wow.

Ben Felix: Same friend.

Cameron Passmore: Same hike.

Ben Felix: I don't know if we'll go on the same route, but the same guy that I went with last time might recreate it.

We still talk about it however many years later, so we figured it might be time to do it again.

Cameron Passmore: We were down touring the Thousand Islands area on the border between Ontario and United States. Boy, it's beautiful. I haven't been down there in a long time.

Ben Felix: Nice.

Cameron Passmore: But to be in the area on a July 4th long weekend to see the cottages and the boats and the people, it's spectacular. Beautiful area. That was super fun.

All right. Well, we'll see you in a couple of days at Montebello.

Ben Felix: Yeah. We've got an employee summit for all of PWL and some of One Digital. It's going to be an experience.

Cameron Passmore: Quite the event.

Ben Felix: The last time we did this, we were a lot smaller than we are now. I was going to say, I don't think we've done something this scale, which is true because we haven't had this many people.

Cameron Passmore: Haven't been this scale.

Ben Felix: Yeah.

Cameron Passmore: It'll be amazing.

Ben Felix: Yeah, it will be.

Cameron Passmore: All right. Anything else on your mind this week?

Ben Felix: No, I think that's good. I hope we have stopped at least one person from getting scammed.

Cameron Passmore: For sure.

Ben Felix: Okay. As always, everybody, thanks for listening.

Cameron Passmore: Great topic.

Ben Felix: All right. Thanks for listening.

Disclosure:

Portfolio management and brokerage services in Canada are offered exclusively by PWL Capital, Inc. (“PWL Capital”) which is regulated by the Canadian Investment Regulatory Organization (CIRO) and is a member of the Canadian Investor Protection Fund (CIPF). Investment advisory services in the United States of America are offered exclusively by OneDigital Investment Advisors LLC (“OneDigital”). OneDigital and PWL Capital are affiliated entities, however, each company has financial responsibility for only its own products and services.

Nothing herein constitutes an offer or solicitation to buy or sell any security. This communication is distributed for informational purposes only; the information contained herein has been derived from sources believed to be accurate, but no guarantee as to its accuracy or completeness can be made. Furthermore, nothing herein should be construed as investment, tax or legal advice and/or used to make any investment decisions. Different types of investments and investment strategies have varying degrees of risk and are not suitable for all investors. You should consult with a professional adviser to see how the information contained herein may apply to your individual circumstances. All market indices discussed are unmanaged, do not incur management fees, and cannot be invested in directly. All investing involves risk of loss and nothing herein should be construed as a guarantee of any specific outcome or profit. Past performance is not indicative of or a guarantee of future results. All statements and opinions presented herein are those of the individual hosts and/or guests, are current only as of this communication’s original publication date and are subject to change without notice. Neither OneDigital nor PWL Capital has any obligation to provide revised statements and/or opinions in the event of changed circumstances.

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