Securities & Stock Broker Fraud Blog
Miller Stern Lawyers – 410-Law-Firm is currently investigating clients of Wells Fargo Advisors who are victims of, and suffered damages and losses, due to the failure to supervise. It has been reported that Wells Fargo Advisors has agreed to pay more than $550,000 in fines and restitution for failing to follow up on warnings it received about two now-barred California brokers who piled their customers into speculative energy stocks, according to FINRA. Miller Stern Lawyers recently won a $1.5 Million award against Stifel for similar actions of piling their customers into biotechnology and health care stocks.
According to FINRA, the firm failed to investigate trading across customer accounts managed by the brokers. Red flags were raised about overconcentration in the accounts of four customers in a single, low-priced energy stock (ranging from 35.2% to 87.0%), according to a consent letter signed on Thursday by Wells Fargo Advisors CEO Jim Hays.
According to Advisor Hub customer complaints and litigation against brokerages will be heating up with the market turmoil. Most of the industry will likely conclude that coronavirus pandemic fears and oil wars between Russia and Saudi Arabia are the cause of the market drop and are totally out of anyone one person or companies control, however there can be broker misconduct involved in the level of losses because of things such as over-concentration and other individual account irregularities.