Tim O'Connor's Blog

The past five years have seen an increase of cases involving the theft of monies from investment accounts.  Most notably, the Bernard Madoff case involved a theft of over 20 billion dollars from unsuspecting investors.  While the rights of theft victims seeking the recovery of their monies under the civil laws are clear, many victimized […]

What is account churning?  Account churning is when a financial advisor engages in the repeated purchase and sale of investments such as stocks and mutual funds for the sole purpose of generating sales commissions.  Churning activity in an investment account can deplete an account’s value due to the payment of excessive commissions, and even margin […]

Internal Revenue Code §72t is a provision which permits retirees under the age of 59½  to withdraw monies from their IRA accounts pursuant to a mathematical formula of scheduled, periodic withdrawals.  Unfortunately, this provision has been used by unscrupulous financial advisors who have implemented excessive levels of withdrawals, which are not only permitted by the […]

The past ten years has seen an explosion in the sale of variable annuity investments to the investing public.  Variable annuities are an investment vehicle, which includes certain tax deferral benefits invested in any number of sub-accounts oftentimes tied to the performance of the stock market.  These investments include annual fees and charges which often […]

Most recently, we have seen a number of separate schemes involving the fraudulent transfer of monies out of legitimate individual retirement annuities and variable annuity-type accounts into a bogus corporation.  In such a scheme, the sales agent appointed by the respective insurance companies has exploited weaknesses in the supervisory, compliance, managerial and administrative systems at the brokerage […]