Social media has become a huge part of all our lives in recent years, so it stands to reason that we'd eventually see it put to use in investing fraud. An investment adviser named Anthony Fields, based in suburban Chicago, recently started going to LinkedIn discussion groups and began promoting "bank guarantees" and "medium-term notes," which eventually caught the notice of the SEC.
No one was foolish enough to fall for Fields' schemes, but the SEC has charged him with offering to sell more than $500 million in securities via various social media sites. According to the SEC, Fields also had no books or records to back up his deals, and held himself out as a broker-dealer when he was no such thing.
The SEC has also said that they've detected more such fraud cases involving social media, that this might just be the tip of the iceberg. It should go without saying that your financial future is not something that should be decided on a whim, as a result of something you came across on the Internet. It's fortunate that no one fell for Fields' LinkedIn spiel; let's hope that investors are too savvy to ever do so.
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