Blog & Investigations

We recently filed a FINRA arbitration on behalf of a retired school teacher in New Orleans who had been sold annuities by a Voya (formerly ING) broker on the premise that a 7% return was “guaranteed.” Anytime our client questioned…

NEW YORK, July 20 2016—Safirstein Metcalf and The Galbraith Law Firm announce that they are investigating misconduct by MetLife Securities Inc. in connection with variable annuities. FINRA, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, has fined MetLife Securities $20 million and ordered…

FINRA has fined New Jersey’s Comprehensive Asset Management Services, Inc. $475,000 for failing to supervise its employees who sold variable annuities to the firm’s customers. According to FINRA’s Department of Enforcement, the firm failed to carefully look at its customers’ “ages,…

The state of Massachusetts has charged Realty Capital Securities (RCS) with fraudulently rounding up proxy votes to support real estate deals sponsored by AR Capital. RCS, a wholesale broker-dealer, and AR Capital are both owned by RCS Capital Corp. (RCAP).…

In order to keep readers informed of their legal rights, and to help prospective clients understand our practice, we like to highlight some of our representative engagements. Today, we focus on two engagements on behalf of financial services professionals. In…

A recent op-ed in the New York Times revealed that conflicted advice from financial advisors to investors causes approximately $17 billion in losses to American families every year. The authors, professor Lily Batchelder and economist Jared Bernstein, strongly advocate a rule that all financial…

The Public Investors Arbitration Bar Association (PIABA) today released an important study exposing some very troubling facts about arbitration at the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA). Despite FINRA’s public claims to provide a diverse pool from which its arbitrators are…

Nearly every time an investor opens a brokerage account, he or she agrees to arbitrate any disputes with the brokerage firm at the dispute-resolution wing of FINRA, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority. Just by signing the account-opening forms, the investor…

Guest post by April Harris, Fordham University School of Law JD Candidate (2015) With age comes wisdom, and for many older investors, wealth. For some seniors, their “save for a rainy day” approach has paid off such that a lifetime…