Financial Abuse By Financial Professionals Breaks My Heart

What breaks my heart is that the victims are often elderly, as they are attractive targets for the financial predator.  Secondly, the elderly do not have the strength, nor the resources to stand up to the corporate perpetrators of the crime. Elder financial abuse, usually without recourse through the criminal code then becomes a risk free profit centre for investment product sellers.

My heart gets broken again when police, prosecutors and regulatory systems turn a blind eye to financial harm and violence done by our most trusted corporations.  Typically, these groups do not prosecute, or even knock on the doors of “trusted” (or powerful) corporations for fear of the blowback.  Systemic financial abuse becomes an area where industry paid regulators often "see no evil" due to the many loyalties and conflicts of interest that are built into the system.

Another heartbreak comes as I witness our civil society being slowly strangled economically. Quality jobs are lost, replaced by dead end service work.  Production of real goods ends, plants are closed.  

Crime, poverty, violence and hopelessness increases at a rate almost equal to the rate with which banks and investment companies skim the wealth of the nation. Financial corporate giants seem to be pillaging the wealth of the nation and leaving the injuries to be absorbed by the rest of society.  Banks may well be the modern day equivalent of Viking plunderers.

It is like watching the ship of society slowly sink, while there are lifeboats only for first class passengers….I could be wrong, but it still breaks my heart.

In the worst cases they have no remaining choices in life, after they have been “sold out” by bank sales employees, whom the bank poses fraudulently as “trusted advisors”.  Who exactly is big enough to stand up to a Canadian bank?  Answer: No one in the land.  Financial abuse by financial corporations and their sales agents is the greatest profit center in the world today.  And a source of harm to society.

The average bank employee does “what they are told”, putting the customer into questionable in-house investment strategies which make banks richer, and at times, questionable borrowing which also makes the bank richer. 

Then, when the elderly customer makes a complaint, they are sent into a special kind of legal/regulatory purgatory from which they will never exit, and they will never get properly compensated.  Round and round they will go for years, in a whirlpool of industry-paid defenders and apologists, who occupy nearly every position of “regulatory” oversight.

If the victims are ever compensated, it will be for pennies on the dollar lost, and it will be for one reason only…to “purchase” for pennies, the legal gag order on the abuse victims. Effectively using a portion of their own lost money to buy the victim's silence, about the crime.  I am told by victims that this feels like extortion.  Such is the power of the most powerful banks in the world today.

It breaks my heart to meet proud Canadians, who have found themselves standing alone, against the strongest banks in the world, penniless in some cases, and forced into selling their last remaining asset, their “voice” to speak, of the abuse, handed to them at the hands of banks and unlicensed advisors.

I live in a world where billion dollar corporations can abuse people, while simultaneously advertising how trustworthy and honest they are.   This feels like a rather "upside down" version of reality.

I live in a world where this could be the sad experience of my children, your children, and their children and so on.

I worked 20 years inside the top financial firms, spoke out against against abusive practices for ten years from the inside, fought another 12 after leaving, and learned more than I cared to know about the problem of financial violence as done by financial corporations.

It simply breaks my heart to know what I know.

To gain specific details of HOW banks and investment dealers get away with this, see what I feel is perhaps the "root" cause of much of it.  The fraudulent concealment of commission salespersons licenses behind faked (non licensed) "advisor" titles.   SEE THIS LINK  http://unpublishedottawa.com/letter/64996/funny-thing-happened-way-ottawa