US and UK regulators announced new investor-protection actions on October 30, including a $600,000 SEC penalty against United Planners following substantial client losses in leveraged ETFs and three FCA warnings involving investment-firm impersonation. In today’s regulatory roundup, the SEC’s findings reveal that 54 advisory clients lost approximately 70% of their investments in unsuitable leveraged and inverse funds, while the FCA identified websites misusing the identities of Octopus Investments, Shard-related financial businesses and an authorised investment fund.
SEC fines United Planners $600,000 over leveraged ETF losses
The US Securities and Exchange Commission has sanctioned Scottsdale-based United Planners’ Financial Services of America A Limited Partner for breaches of fiduciary duty involving leveraged and inverse exchange-traded funds purchased for 54 investment advisory clients.
In an October 30 administrative proceeding, the regulator found that United Planners and its former investment adviser representative, Cary Urich, invested discretionary client accounts in products that were unsuitable for their investment objectives, financial circumstances and risk tolerances.
The conduct occurred between April 2020 and November 2023. According to the SEC, the products represented substantial concentrations within the affected accounts and remained there for extended periods despite warnings that leveraged and inverse ETFs were generally designed for daily or short-term trading.
The regulator found that the 54 clients lost approximately 70% of their investments in those ETFs. That figure concerns the money invested in the affected products, not necessarily 70% of each customer’s entire investment portfolio.
United Planners consented to a $600,000 civil penalty, censure and cease-and-desist order without admitting the SEC’s findings.
The SEC’s October 30 enforcement announcement also identified violations of Section 206(2) and Section 206(4) of the Investment Advisers Act of 1940, as well as Rule 206(4)-7 governing investment adviser compliance policies and procedures.
Investigators found that United Planners failed to implement certain policies and procedures reasonably designed to prevent violations of the Advisers Act. The SEC also concluded that the firm and Urich failed to adequately disclose the prolonged holding periods and associated product risks.
The action was accompanied by a separate civil enforcement proceeding against Urich, filed in federal court in South Carolina on October 29.
That complaint contains additional details about the affected investors. The SEC alleged that most of the 54 customers were elderly and that their savings and retirement funds were concentrated in complex ETFs that did not match their financial profiles.
Most notably, the complaint states that Urich held the leveraged and inverse products for an average of 798 days. That is a very long holding period for products whose prospectuses cautioned against ownership beyond a single day.
Urich agreed, without admitting the allegations, to a proposed settlement that would impose a $100,000 civil penalty, a permanent injunction against specified antifraud violations and a two-year prohibition on acting as or associating with an investment adviser. The proposed final judgment remained subject to court approval in the SEC’s October 30 announcement.
The two penalties total $700,000 if the proposed Urich judgment is approved. The SEC announcements do not establish that the civil penalties themselves will be distributed directly to the affected customers.
Why the 798-day holding period changes the risk assessment
Leveraged and inverse ETFs typically seek to deliver a multiple of an index’s daily return or its inverse. Their exposure is reset or rebalanced according to the product’s specified investment objective, making returns over longer periods dependent on the sequence of daily price changes.
A fund targeting twice the daily return of an index does not necessarily deliver twice that index’s cumulative return over several months or years.
For example, consider an index that rises 10% on one day and falls approximately 9.09% the next, returning roughly to its starting value. A hypothetical fund delivering twice the daily movement would gain 20% and then lose approximately 18.18%, leaving an overall decline of about 1.82% before fees and other tracking effects.
The illustration is not a reconstruction of the United Planners accounts. It demonstrates how daily compounding can produce losses over a longer holding period even when the underlying index finishes close to unchanged.
The SEC’s case also concerns adviser obligations, not merely investment performance. Investors can lose money in appropriate investments without a fiduciary violation. Here, the regulator found a combination of unsuitable recommendations, substantial portfolio concentrations, prolonged holdings, inadequate risk disclousres and deficient compliance controls.
The losses were large, but the conduct behind them was the enforcement focus.
The investment products identified in the case belong to a market that continues to expand into increasingly complex exposures. DaveFinances previously examined leveraged equity-linked perpetual contracts based on ETFs, where derivatives exposure can be added to investment products already designed to magnify daily movements.
Those exchange-traded crypto derivatives are distinct from the ETFs involved in the SEC proceeding. They nevertheless demonstrate how leverage can be layered across financial instruments, making product structure and holding periods increasingly important to investor risk assessments.
The United Planners enforcement action does not establish that all long-term holdings of leveraged ETFs are automatically unlawful. The SEC’s findings were based on the affected clients’ individual circumstances, investment objectives, exposure concentrations and the advisers’ failure to disclose material risks.
FCA identifies Octopus, Shard and Northern Index clones
In the UK, the Financial Conduct Authority issued three separate clone-firm warnings on October 30, identifying unauthorised operations using the identities of established investment businesses and funds.
The warnings concern client.octopus-firm.com, shardcreditpartners.uk and Northern Index, associated with the website listed as ww.northernindex.com.
Three warnings, all published on the same Friday.
The FCA said these operations were contacting consumers while pretending to represent legitimate authorised financial businesses. The regulator has not publicly established a relationship between the three operators.
The first warning concerns client.octopus-firm.com, which the FCA identifies as a clone of Octopus Investments Limited.
The genuine Octopus Investments is an FCA-authorised firm with reference number 194779 and a registered address at 33 Holborn, London, EC1N 2HT. The regulator explicitly states that the legitimate firm has no connection with the impersonating website.
The clone uses a domain incorporating the Octopus name, potentially encouraging consumers to associate an unfamiliar client portal with an established investment manager. The FCA did not disclose how many investors were approached or whether any financial losses had occurred.
The second warning identifies shardcreditpartners.uk as an unauthorised clone using the details of Shard-related investment businesses.
The FCA lists two genuine companies whose identities have been misused: Shard Capital AIFM LLP, with firm reference number 615463, and Shard Credit Partners Ltd, with reference number 702785.
The companies have different registered addresses in London. Shard Capital AIFM LLP is listed at 51 Lime Street, while Shard Credit Partners Ltd is registered at 83 Victoria Street.
The warning identifies the fraudulent website and email addresses but provides no transaction totals, customer complaints or evidence identifying the individuals responsible for the impersonation.
The third warning involves Northern Index, which the FCA describes as a clone of an authorised investment fund rather than a conventional investment firm.
The regulator identifies the genuine fund being impersonated as THE NORTHERN FUNDS, which holds authorised status on the FCA’s financial services register.
The Northern Index operation has used addresses in London, Sydney and Toronto, along with telephone numbers carrying UK, Australian and Canadian country codes.
Its listed website is ww.northernindex.com. The multiple international contact details are documented in the warning, although they do not independently establish that the operator maintains physical offices in those jurisdictions.
The names are familiar-looking, which is what makes this method work.
The warnings follow other FCA alerts involving cloned investment identities. In September, DaveFinances reported that 22K Trader was accused of impersonating an authorised investment fund, alongside separate warnings concerning two unauthorised trading websites.
That earlier case concerned IFSL Equilibrium Balanced Portfolio, a different genuine investment fund. The latest Northern Index warning shows the same general impersonation method, but there is no published evidence linking the operators.
Clone warnings expose risks beyond copied company names
The three FCA notices identify a specific verification problem: an investor can find a genuine company or fund on a regulatory register but still be dealing with an unrelated website using its identity.
The FCA states that clone operators may combine authentic firm names, registration numbers and addresses with fraudulent domains, email accounts and telephone numbers.
Consequently, checking only whether a company name appears in the regulator’s database is not sufficient to authenticate a person requesting an investment or a transfer of funds.
Investors need to compare the website, contact information and permissions of the entity they are dealing with against the FCA’s independently maintained records. DaveFinances’ guide to FCA and other financial regulatory licences examines why verifying the precise legal entity and its authorised activities provides more meaningful protection than accepting a registration number.
The Octopus warning is a clear example. Octopus Investments Limited is a genuine authorised business. The FCA’s warning does not accuse that company of misconduct; it identifies a seperate, unauthorised operation impersonating it.
The regulator also warns that customers dealing with unauthorised clones generally cannot rely on the Financial Ombudsman Service for complaints against those operators or on Financial Services Compensation Scheme protection if the operations fail.
There may be limited recovery possibilities under other rules. The FCA notes that certain victims who transferred money to fraudsters on or after October 7, 2024, may qualify for protections introduced by the Payment Systems Regulator, depending on the payment circumstances and applicable eligibility conditions.
Neither that possibility nor the existence of an FCA warning establishes that compensation will be available to every customer affected by a cloned investment website.
The October 30 warning notices do not identify customer-loss amounts, criminal charges or enforcement proceedings against the people operating the three websites. They also do not show that the domains form part of a single fraud network.
The SEC and FCA actions address different failures. United Planners was a regulated investment business sanctioned over how it handled customer investments and risk controls. The UK warnings concern unauthorised operators borrowing the identities of legitimate financial institutions.
One case involves documented losses and a settled regulatory penalty; the others are warnings intended to prevent consumers from dealing with impersonators. The evidence and legal status are different, even if both concern whether investors can rely on the financial professionals and institutions they believe they are dealing with.
Johan Shamshad is a financial markets writer at Dave Finances covering cryptocurrencies, trading platforms, brokers, fintech, financial regulation, and developments across global markets. He previously worked at Gulf News, adding newsroom experience to his coverage of fast-moving financial and digital-asset markets.
His work focuses on identifying market-moving events, company developments, regulatory changes, product launches, and shifts in trading and financial infrastructure.
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