SEC, FINRA, CFTC, NASAA, NFA and SIPC issue a joint investor bulletin

Six regulators—the SEC's Office of Investor Education and Assistance, the CFTC's Office of Customer Education and Outreach, FINRA, NASAA, the National Futures Association and SIPC—issued a joint investor bulletin on October 5 for World Investor Week 2026, IOSCO's global campaign to raise awareness of investor education and protection. That produces a document an advisor can put in front of a client with no firm-authored writing in it, and its two halves track the two conversations practices tend to have late in the year: how to sit through a market drop, and how to spot a scam.

The first half is familiar ground—being a resilient investor, the bulletin says, means having a plan that can still reach your goals despite market changes and preparing in advance for change so you stay the course.

The fraud half is the operational one: fraudulent investment schemes, relationship investment scams among them, have cost investors worldwide billions of dollars each year, and the bulletin says relationship scams in particular continue to rise. Artificial intelligence is making the impersonations inside them more convincing and harder to tell from the real thing, as fraudsters pose as legitimate individuals and companies—regulators among them—and misuse or fabricate the documents and filings investors lean on to inform their decisions. The paperwork a careful client asks for is now part of the attack.

The bulletin's countermeasure is a registration check. Brokerage firms and the individuals who buy and sell securities, commodity futures or other derivatives must meet specific registration requirements, and the regulators direct investors to three lookups—the SEC's Check Out Your Investment Professional tool on Investor.gov, FINRA's BrokerCheck and the NFA's BASIC system. Those tools confirm whether a name is registered, but they do not establish that the person using the name is the person on the registration; that gap is what the AI warnings describe, and it is why a client can run every check the bulletin recommends and still be dealing with an impostor.

At the desk, the useful move is to walk the bulletin with a client rather than forward it, since it is written for investors and a review meeting is the natural setting: the registration tools can be opened on a screen, a family can see what BrokerCheck returns for the advisor they already use, and the rule about verifying money-movement instructions gets established before anyone is asked to move money.

The registration lookup is the regulators' step, and the bulletin makes it easy to run; hanging up and dialing the number the client already has on file—the callback—is the half advisors add themselves.