The Securities Helpline for Seniors is a resource for senior investors to reach out to and speak to a live, knowledgeable FINRA staff member regarding concerns or questions that they might have about their securities account, investments or brokerage accounts. We launched in April of 2015 and over that course of time, we received over eighteen thousand individual calls. We have referred over fourteen hundred matters to various state, federal and international regulators, as well as reported over two hundred matters to various adult protective services agencies. Senior investors have always been a area that FINRA has focused on and this is just another mechanism. An average of ten thousand individuals becoming sixty-five a day, FINRA wanted to continue to provide a place for senior investors to be heard. You can expect to speak to a knowledgeable individual. Our core focus is on senior investors; however, we do receive calls from individuals of all ages and we’ve had individuals from as young as seventeen all the way up to a hundred and two. All fifty states have been represented. We offer a bridge between the investor and brokerage firms. And through that process, we’ve been able to work with firms and over seven million dollars have gone back into the hands of investors. The majority of the calls really fall within the educational bucket so these are individuals who want to know how variable annuities work, what a surrender charge is, how they can ensure that their assets move appropriately to an individual upon death. We also get calls from other individuals that might be concerned about a senior investor. We receive calls from family members, we receive calls from attorneys of senior investors. We received a call from a C-P-A who came across certain information as they were preparing the taxes for the senior investor and identified a large sum of money that was going out to somebody and it looked suspicious. We had an individual who called in to the helpline and they were concerned about money that was moved from their investment account so those were funds that they shouldn’t have been taxed for and when they rolled it over to that firm, they were hit with immense tax consequences. We reached out to the brokerage firm, the firm offered to reimburse the customer those tax consequences. The Securities Helpline for Seniors is a resource for anybody to leverage.
