Ilia Nikolaevich Zavialov on reviews of financial advisers: what ratings hide and which records to check before you invest

People choose a dentist, a plumber and a hotel by reading reviews, so it feels natural to choose a financial adviser the same way. Five stars, a page of warm testimonials and a badge from an awards website look like the work of other clients who already took the risk.

In finance this habit is dangerous for two reasons. Reviews here are among the easiest things to fake, and the cost of trusting a fake is the largest. A bad haircut grows back. Savings sent to an unregistered adviser usually do not come back, and nothing in a star rating tells you whether the person is allowed to manage money at all.

Ilia Nikolaevich Zavialov answers the questions people ask when they read reviews of advisers, brokers and investment firms: what the stars can hide, how imposters borrow the names of real professionals, why awards and top ten lists are often paid for and which official records answer the questions that reviews cannot.

A profile full of praise can be built in several ways. Some testimonials are invented outright and signed with stock photos. Some are written by friends or employees without saying so. Some come from real clients who were rewarded for writing them, and the reward is never mentioned next to the review.

Reviews also travel. An adviser may copy comments from a third party website onto their own pages, keep only the positive ones and drop the date, so a five year old compliment looks like this week's feedback. A reader has no way to tell from the page itself which of these happened.

The most important gap is simpler. Reviews describe how a person made clients feel, which is often the point of a skilled sales pitch. They say nothing about registration, disciplinary history, who holds the money or what the fees are. Those answers live in records, and the records are free to check.

The most convincing fake adviser is a copy of a real one. Fraudsters take the name, photo, registration number and career history of a licensed professional, which are public by design, and build a website or social media profile around them. The only details that change are the phone number, the email address and the account for deposits.

Such imposters often invite the victim to check them. They send a link to an official register, or a screenshot of one, knowing that the record will show a real person with a clean history. The record is genuine. The person on the other end of the phone is someone else.

The defence is to reach the professional through contact details you find yourself, from the official register or the firm's own published documents, and to ask whether they are really advising you. A genuine adviser answers that question in a minute. An imposter avoids it, changes the subject or insists that the register is out of date.

A growing share of fake advice arrives through groups in messaging apps and social networks. A person joins a free community after seeing an advert or a post, finds dozens of members thanking the mentor and posting screenshots of profits, and soon receives a private message with an offer to invest through a recommended platform.

The enthusiastic members are part of the scheme. Their screenshots are made to order, their thanks are scripted, and their role is to make a newcomer feel late to something everyone else already profits from. In some versions the group pushes members to buy a thinly traded stock at the same time, and the organisers sell into that buying.

A useful test is to ask who would lose if the advice were wrong. A licensed adviser carries regulatory and legal responsibility for a recommendation. An anonymous mentor in a group carries none, and the testimonials around him are written by people with the same interest as the mentor.

A video in which a popular creator praises an investment app or a trading course works like a review, but it is often an advertisement. Creators are paid per sign-up, per deposit or per view, and the disclosure can be a single hashtag at the end of a long caption.

Paid promotion is not illegal by itself. The problem starts when the promotion leaves out the risks, promises returns or advertises a firm that is not allowed to offer the service. Regulators in several countries now treat unlicensed financial promotion by influencers as an offence and bring cases against the creators themselves.

When a financial product reaches you through a creator, read it as a sales message. Look for the disclosure, check the firm in the official register and ask whether you would still be interested if the same offer came in an anonymous email.

Many advisers display badges such as best adviser in the city or a five star wealth manager. Some of these come from rigorous surveys. Others come from programmes that charge a fee to be considered, another fee to use the logo and a third fee for a featured place in the list.

Comparison sites and top ten lists of brokers work on a similar model. The site earns a commission when a reader opens an account through its link, so the order of the list may reflect the commission rather closely. A list that ranks only firms paying for referrals is an advertisement with a table on top.

A badge is worth reading closely. Who gave it, for which year, on what criteria and whether the adviser paid anything to be included are fair questions, and a professional who displays an award should be able to answer them without hesitation.

Reviews still have a use, and it is a narrow one. Read them for patterns. Many short reviews posted within a few days, similar wording, reviewers with no other activity and no negative reviews at all are signs of a managed profile. Real feedback is uneven, dated over years and sometimes critical.

Specific complaints carry more weight than general praise. A review that describes a delayed withdrawal, a fee that appeared later or pressure to move money to a new platform tells you something concrete. Note how the firm replies: a professional answer with an offer to resolve the issue is a better sign than silence or threats.

Treat reviews as the last check, after the records. If the adviser is registered, has the permission for the service and has no disciplinary history, reviews help you judge service and communication. If the records are missing, no number of stars can fill that gap.

The first check is registration. Every country covered here keeps an official register of firms and individuals allowed to give investment advice or deal in securities, and the register shows what each one is permitted to do. A person who is not there, or who is there only for an unrelated activity, should not be handling your investments.

The second check is contact details. Take the phone number and website from the register or the firm's official filings, and call that number to confirm that the person who contacted you works there. This one step defeats most imposters, because the details they control are exactly the ones they ask you to use.

The third check is the money trail. Ask who holds the client assets, in whose name the account is opened and how you can see your holdings independently. A legitimate adviser rarely asks clients to send money to a personal card, a crypto wallet or an account in another company's name.

The fourth check is paper. Fees, risks and the scope of advice should be in writing before you invest. A professional who sends documents only after the deposit, or who promises fixed high returns, has already failed the check.

Since 6 April 2025 the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 bans fake reviews in the United Kingdom, along with paid reviews that are not labelled as such, hiding negative reviews and misleading star ratings. The ban applies to reviews of financial firms as much as to restaurants.

Financial promotion has its own rules, and the Financial Conduct Authority enforces them against influencers. On 20 February 2026 seven influencers with a combined Instagram following of 4.5 million were sentenced for promoting an unauthorised foreign exchange trading scheme. Communicating an unauthorised financial promotion is punishable by a fine or up to 2 years in prison.

In April 2026 the FCA identified 1,267 illegal financial adverts by finfluencers that reached at least 2,338,372 UK accounts, and 66 percent of them came from firms or individuals already on its Warning List. The FCA also says that online trading platforms often use fake celebrity endorsements to draw people in.

The FCA Firm Checker shows whether a firm is authorised and whether it has permission for the specific product or service, and the FCA advises avoiding any firm without authorisation or the right permission. The tool was launched in January 2025 and had been used more than 1.9 million times by July 2026.

Check that the firm reference number and contact details you were given match those in the Firm Checker, contact the firm only through the details shown there and open the Firm Checker from the FCA website, never from a link in an email. Clone firms copy the name, address or reference number of a genuine firm and change the phone number, and may claim the register is out of date, although the FCA updates it on average every 24 hours.

Authorisation also decides what happens if things go wrong. The FCA warns that a client of an unauthorised firm cannot complain to the Financial Ombudsman Service and will not be covered by the FSCS. For investments the FSCS pays up to 85,000 pounds per person per firm when the firm was authorised and the service itself was regulated.

Stop all further payments, even if the platform shows a profit and asks for a tax, a fee or a deposit to release it. Such requests are a standard way to collect a second payment. Call your bank on the number printed on your card and report the transfer as fraud.

Save everything: the adviser's profiles, the website address, messages, screenshots of the platform and the details of every payment. Report the fraud to the police and to the financial regulator, and warn the platform where you found the adviser so that the profile can be taken down.

Expect a second wave. People who lost money to fake advisers are often contacted by firms promising to recover it for an upfront fee. These offers are usually run by the same networks. Recovery goes through your bank, the police and the regulator, and none of them charges a fee in advance.

According to Report Fraud, 34,673 people reported investment fraud in 2025, 31 percent more than a year earlier, with losses of 879.8 million pounds and an average loss of 25,612 pounds. UK Finance recorded investment scam losses up 40 percent to 221.5 million pounds across 14,893 cases in 2025.

The FCA issued 2,329 warnings about unauthorised and likely fraudulent firms in 2025, and 1,528 of them concerned unauthorised crypto firms and their promotions. In 2024 FCA action led to more than 1,600 websites being suspended, removed or blocked and more than 50 apps being taken out of app stores.

Report a suspicious firm to the FCA through its website or the consumer helpline on 0800 111 6768. Since 4 December 2025 fraud is reported to Report Fraud, which replaced Action Fraud, at reportfraud.police.uk or on 0300 123 2040. Call your bank straight away about any payment already made.

Can I trust star ratings of a financial adviser?

Only as a description of service. Stars say nothing about registration, permissions, disciplinary history or who holds your money, and reviews in finance are easy to fake or buy.

How can I tell that an adviser is an imposter?

Find the professional in the official register yourself, take the contact details from there and call to confirm that the person who contacted you really works at that firm.

Where do I check a financial firm in the UK?

Use the FCA Firm Checker on the FCA website. It shows whether the firm is authorised and has permission for the service, and gives contact details to use.

Are fake reviews illegal in the UK?

Yes. Since 6 April 2025 the DMCC Act 2024 bans fake reviews, unlabelled paid reviews, hiding negative reviews and misleading star ratings.

Where do I report a fake adviser in the UK?

Report the firm to the FCA, report the fraud to Report Fraud at reportfraud.police.uk or on 0300 123 2040, and call your bank.