I’ve been in this business for 28 years. I’ve lived through the dot-com collapse, Enron, the 2008 financial crisis, Bernie Madoff getting exposed, and every other moment where the financial industry showed its worst side. Each time, I thought: well, that was bad. Hopefully we learned something.

We didn’t.

I’ll say it plainly: when historians sit down in 2030 and write the financial chapter of this decade, I believe they are going to look at 2020 to 2030 as one of the most concentrated periods of large-scale white collar crime and financial fraud in modern American history. The scale. The brazenness. The sheer number of ordinary investors who got burned.

And the frustrating part? Most of it was hiding in plain sight.

What Actually Happened

Let’s run through what the 2020s have handed us so far, because it’s worth actually naming it.

The SPAC explosion and collapse. Special Purpose Acquisition Companies — blank-check companies raised from public investors with the promise of finding a great private company to merge with — went completely off the rails starting around 2020. Thousands of SPACs were launched. Retail investors poured money in based on celebrity endorsements, hype, and projections that turned out to be, let’s say, optimistic. By 2022 and 2023, the SEC was neck deep in enforcement actions. Investors who bought SPACs at $10 watched many of them trade to $1 or $2. Billions in losses.

The crypto boom and the frauds underneath it. I’m not here to tell you crypto is worthless — that’s a different conversation. I’m here to tell you what happened inside the crypto industry during the first half of the 2020s was an unprecedented transfer of wealth from regular people to fraudsters. FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried. Three Arrows Capital. Celsius. Voyager Digital. Luna/Terra. Billions of dollars. Millions of customers. Some of these people had retirement money in there. Real money. Gone.

The “financial influencer” phenomenon. Social media gave anyone with a camera and an opinion a financial platform. Unlicensed, unregistered, unaccountable people building audiences in the hundreds of thousands and telling them what to buy. Some of them were simply ignorant. Some of them were running pump-and-dump schemes in the background while filming their lifestyle content. The SEC has brought an increasing number of actions in this space, but enforcement lags the behavior by years. By the time a case gets made, the damage is done.

Pension and retirement plan exploitation. This one doesn’t get as much press, but it should. Bad actors targeting retirees with unsuitable annuity products. Advisors churning accounts to generate commissions. Hidden fees buried in fund structures that quietly extract thousands per year from accounts that never asked. I see the wreckage of this when clients come in from other firms. It’s not always fraud in the criminal sense — sometimes it’s perfectly legal behavior that is nonetheless predatory.

Why This Decade in Particular?

A few things converged to create perfect conditions for financial misconduct on a large scale.

Zero interest rates sent everyone chasing yield and returns. When savings accounts pay nothing and bonds pay nothing and the stock market is ripping, people get desperate. Desperate people make bad decisions and are easy marks for anyone promising something better.

The pandemic scrambled people’s financial psychology. The stimulus checks. The market crash and the rapid recovery. The meme stock phenomenon. WallStreetBets. Dogecoin. People were doing things with their money in 2020 and 2021 that they would never have considered in a normal year. That created opportunity for exploitation.

Social media removed the filters. In previous decades, if someone wanted to reach a million investors with a bad idea, they’d need a TV show or a radio program. The gatekeepers would slow-roll the most obvious nonsense. In the 2020s, a 22-year-old with a ring light and a persuasive personality can build a financial audience of a million people in six months. No license required.

And the regulatory apparatus didn’t keep up. The SEC and FINRA are not bad organizations — they employ a lot of good people trying to do important work. But they are slow, and the financial innovation of the 2020s was fast. Crypto operated in a regulatory gray zone for years. By the time rules caught up, the fraud had already happened.

What This Means If You’re Close to Retirement

Here’s the part I really want you to hear, especially if you’re in your late 50s or early 60s and you have a substantial amount saved.

The Red Zone is when fraud does the most damage. If you’re 62 and you lose $400,000 to a bad actor or a predatory product, you don’t have 15 years to recover it. That money is gone from your retirement income. The sequence of returns is brutal enough when markets just go against you. When fraud is involved, there’s often no recovery at all.

This is not a reason to be paralyzed. It’s a reason to be careful about a few specific things.

Know who you are working with. Any financial professional serving you should be registered and their registration history should be publicly searchable through FINRA BrokerCheck or the SEC’s Investment Adviser Public Disclosure database. Use them. Five minutes of research can tell you whether someone has complaints, regulatory actions, or a history of moving from firm to firm.

Understand how your advisor gets paid. Fee-only advisors charge you directly. Commission-based advisors earn money when you buy things. Neither structure is inherently bad, but you should know which one you’re dealing with and think about how it might shape the advice you receive.

Be deeply skeptical of guaranteed returns. There is no investment that guarantees outsized returns without risk. The moment someone tells you otherwise, your fraud radar should be pinging at maximum volume. This applies to crypto, alternatives, annuities with complex structures, and anything else wrapped in language designed to make it sound like you can’t lose.

Don’t make financial decisions based on social media. I know that sounds obvious, and I also know that millions of Americans did exactly the opposite over the last five years.

The Uncomfortable Truth About Our Industry

I’ve been a registered financial advisor in California for 28 years. I’ve spent a lot of that time frustrated with how our industry operates at its worst. The conflicts of interest are real. The incentives to sell product rather than give advice are real. The complexity that benefits advisors more than clients is real.

None of that means every advisor is crooked — most of them aren’t. But it does mean that the decade we’re living through has provided ample evidence that the guardrails in the financial system are not strong enough, and that ordinary investors — especially those approaching retirement — need to be more vigilant than the system requires them to be.

In 2030, the history books will document what happened. The enforcement actions. The prison sentences. The class action settlements. By then it will be too late for the people who got hurt.

Pay attention now.

If you’re a California executive who wants a second opinion on what you’re currently in — what you’re paying, how your accounts are structured, whether the advice you’re receiving actually serves your interests — I’m happy to take a look. No obligation. Call us at 949-492-6900 or visit www.quiverfinancial.com.Securities offered through Registered Representatives. Advisory services through Quiver Financial Holdings, LLC. This blog is for educational purposes only and does not constitute legal or investment advice. Investing involves risk, including the possible loss of principal. The views expressed are those of the author based on publicly available information.