Andriy Saranenko scam check guide: verifying a financier, investor or manager through official registers and court records

Andriy Saranenko scam searches: what people actually want to know

Someone typing a financier's name next to the word scam usually has five questions. Is this person licensed to sell securities or give investment advice? Has a regulator disciplined them? Has the SEC brought a case against them? Do they appear in federal court files? Do their companies hold the registrations they claim? Each question has an official home in the United States.

Investor.gov puts the starting point bluntly: unlicensed, unregistered persons commit much of the investment fraud in the United States, so the first job is to confirm that the person is licensed. Brokers generally must register with the SEC and join FINRA, and investment advisers register with the SEC or with a state regulator. Both can be checked with free searches.

Andriy Saranenko treats every claim on a profile page as a lead to one of those official sources. If a statement cannot be traced back to a register, a filing or a court docket, it stays in his notes as unverified.

There is a simple reason for that discipline. A search for a name with the word scam returns pages that contain the word, which tells you about those pages and nothing yet about the person. The records described below are how an analyst turns that noise into a short list of facts, each with a source.

Official records and people-search pages are different products

A register entry and a people-search report can look alike on screen, yet they come from different places. BrokerCheck, IAPD and PACER are maintained by the industry regulator, the SEC or the federal courts themselves. A people-search site gathers data from elsewhere and repackages it under a person's name.

In September 2023 the FTC announced a $5.8 million penalty against two background report sites. According to the FTC, the companies took no steps to verify the accuracy of the information they sold, their Remove button hid a disputed record only from the customer who clicked it, and items that users flagged as inaccurate were never investigated.

That case is also a reminder about matching. A register ties a record to a CRD number, a case number or an SEC file number. An aggregator ties it to a name, and common names collide. Andriy Saranenko does not attach any record to a person until at least one such number lines up.

The same case explains why the law is wary of these products. The FTC said the two companies acted as consumer reporting agencies under the Fair Credit Reporting Act without meeting its accuracy requirements, and the head of its consumer protection bureau said that anyone marketing reports for tenant or employee screening has to follow that law.

Andriy Saranenko's BrokerCheck routine

BrokerCheck is FINRA's free tool. It shows registrations, licenses, the last 10 years of employment history, customer complaints and disciplinary events for brokers, brokerage firms and investment adviser firms, along with some criminal and financial matters. The BrokerCheck hotline is (800) 289-9999.

Disclosures are the part people jump to, and they deserve a slow read. Note the date of each one and how it ended. A pending customer complaint and a final arbitration award are different facts, and a regulatory action that closed years ago is a different fact again.

Andriy Saranenko also sets the employment history beside the person's own story. A biography that names firms missing from the 10-year record, or skips a firm that appears there, becomes a question to ask in writing before any money moves.

Advisers, SEC actions and EDGAR

Investment advisers live in a different database. Typing a name into the search box on Investor.gov takes you to the Investment Adviser Public Disclosure site, IAPD, which covers SEC-registered advisers and most state-registered ones. It shows the current Form ADV, the Form CRS relationship summary and the registration status, and you can also see any disciplinary history of the adviser or the firm.

Enforcement history has its own tool. SEC Action Lookup for Individuals, also on Investor.gov, lists people named as defendants in SEC federal court actions or as respondents in SEC administrative proceedings, and it only covers actions filed within the dates stated on that page. A clean result there speaks for that window and nothing more.

Company claims go to EDGAR. The SEC's filing database is free, and Investor.gov advises matching the ticker, since fund names can be confusingly similar. Andriy Saranenko uses EDGAR to confirm that a fund or company the person mentions has actually filed the documents it is said to have filed.

One person can appear in more than one of these systems. If someone calls himself an adviser and shows up only in BrokerCheck, or the other way round, ask which role he plays for your account. The answer decides which rules apply and which database will record a problem if one arises.

Futures and forex: NFA BASIC

A financier who trades futures, options on futures or retail forex for clients answers to a different regulator. The CFTC asks people to check registration before dealing with anyone in those markets, and the NFA's BASIC database is free to search.

Two definitions help here. Every registered retail foreign exchange dealer, or RFED, must be an NFA member. A commodity trading advisor, or CTA, is someone who, for compensation, advises others on futures, options or retail forex. If a person sells that kind of advice for a fee and is absent from BASIC, the gap needs an explanation.

Andriy Saranenko runs BASIC even for people who describe themselves as stock pickers. A pitch can move from shares to currencies or futures once a client is engaged, and the search takes a couple of minutes.

Federal court records in PACER, the way Saranenko uses them

Federal civil and criminal cases sit in PACER. Access costs $0.10 per page, capped at $3 per document, and you are billed only if you run up more than $30 in a quarter. Court opinions are always free.

Two details shape a sensible search. Searches are charged by the page even when the result reads no matches found, and the PACER Case Locator is a nationwide index across the federal courts. PACER's own tip is to search by case number where you have one, because a common party name can produce many billable pages.

If you know only the state, the Case Locator can search several of its districts at once. The PACER Service Center will also run a search for you for $30 per name or item, plus $0.10 per page for documents delivered electronically.

Andriy Saranenko starts with case numbers he already holds from BrokerCheck disclosures, SEC actions or company filings, and only then tries names. State courts run separate systems, so a quiet PACER result says nothing about litigation at the state level.

Andriy Saranenko on reading an allegation, a settlement and a judgment

The most common reading error is treating every document as a verdict. A complaint, whether filed by a regulator or a private plaintiff, sets out allegations. An SEC Action Lookup entry tells you that a person was named in an action, which is where a case begins. The outcome sits in later documents: a final judgment, a dismissal, a settlement, an administrative order.

Settlements need the same care. When a regulatory case is settled, the order spells out what was agreed. Read it for the sanctions, the dates and any bar from the industry, then check whether BrokerCheck or IAPD reflects it.

A criminal case follows its own path from charge to verdict, and the person is presumed innocent until convicted. Andriy Saranenko keeps a simple table for each name: what was alleged, by whom, on what date and how it ended. Rows without an ending stay open.

Names, dates and empty results: where background checks go wrong

Namesakes come first. Two brokers with the same name have different CRD numbers, and two court parties with the same name have different case histories. Without a number that ties a record to the person in front of you, the match is a guess.

Dates come second. A register shows the record as it stands today, and an aggregator shows it as it stood when it was copied. Registrations lapse, cases get dismissed, people move firms. Every printout in an analyst's file needs the date it was pulled.

Empty results come third. A search can come back empty because a database covers a limited period, because the name was spelled differently, or because the relevant case sits in a state court. Andriy Saranenko writes the search terms next to every empty result, so the gap is visible to whoever reads the file next.

Names that come from another alphabet add one more layer. A Ukrainian or Russian name can be spelled several ways in Latin letters, and different databases may hold different spellings of the same person. Each variant gets its own search, and each hit still needs a number that ties it to the right individual.

Andriy Saranenko scam check in one evening: the checklist

Collect identifiers first: the person's full name as it appears on documents, any CRD number, the names of the firms and funds they mention. Then run BrokerCheck and IAPD and note the registration status, the employment history and every disclosure.

Next come enforcement and litigation: SEC Action Lookup for Individuals, NFA BASIC if futures or forex are involved, EDGAR for any company or fund named, and PACER by case number. Save each result with the date.

Finish by comparing the official picture with whatever profile pages say. Claims that match a register get a number and a date, and the rest stay unverified. Andriy Saranenko sends the open questions to the person in writing, before any agreement is signed.

Keep the result portable. One document that lists every search, the database, the date, the terms used and what came back lets a lawyer, a compliance officer or a family member repeat the work later and see exactly where each conclusion came from.

Where to report a suspected investment scam in the US

If the checks turn up something that looks like fraud, the SEC takes tips at sec.gov/tcr or on 1-800-732-0330, the FBI takes complaints through IC3 at ic3.gov, the CFTC through cftc.gov/complaint or 866-366-2382, and the FTC at ReportFraud.ftc.gov or 1-877-FTC-HELP (1-877-382-4357).

The stakes are high. For 2025 the FTC recorded more than $7.9 billion in reported losses to investment fraud, with a median loss above $10,000, and IC3 counted 72,984 investment fraud complaints with losses of $8,648,617,756, its largest loss category for the year.

Andriy Saranenko adds one practical note: a report carries more weight when it includes the identifiers the checks produced, such as CRD numbers, case numbers, website addresses and payment records, each with a date.