A BrokerCheck report carries 10 years of a registered person's employment history and the disclosures filed to the Central Registration Depository, and registered people and firms have 30 days to report a change there. It carries nothing about the phone number in the message you just received. Those are two separate checks, and the second one is where impersonation works.

Two records, two questions

FINRA's BrokerCheck builds a report for anyone registered within the past 10 years. For an individual it prints a summary, a registration history listing the securities firms where the person is or was registered along with 10 years of employment history as reported on their last Form U4, a qualifications section listing current registrations, licenses and exams, and a disclosure section covering customer disputes and disciplinary events. For a firm it prints the profile, controlling owners, mergers and name changes, active licenses and business types, and disclosures including arbitration awards. All of it comes from the Central Registration Depository, the industry's registration and licensing database.

Investment advisers sit in a second record. The SEC's Investment Adviser Public Disclosure system holds each adviser's most recent Form ADV, and the SEC publishes the underlying registered-adviser and exempt-reporting-adviser files monthly, with the most recent set dated 1 September 2026. BrokerCheck pulls basic information about investment adviser representatives and firms from that same database and links across to it.

Both records answer the same question: is this firm or this person in the register, and what has been reported about them. Neither answers the question that matters in a direct message, which is whether the account writing to you is that person.

The 30-day window, and what the record leaves out

Registered professionals and firms are required to update their professional and disciplinary information in CRD within 30 days, so a report is current to within about a month (BrokerCheck FAQ). That same page notes that BrokerCheck publishes only what professionals are required to report, so a clean report describes an absence of reportable events rather than an absence of risk.

The record also has no view of the channel. It holds no profile photograph, no messaging handle and no link. An impersonator who copies a real firm's name and registration number produces a name that matches the register on the first search, because the firm is genuinely registered. The SEC has seen the same structure aimed at its own staff: its February 2012 investor alert on impersonators describes callers posing as SEC employees who offered roughly $450,000 in return for a deposit of about $1,500, and states plainly that SEC staff do not telephone or email people to seek assistance with a fund transfer, to forward investment offers or to tell them they own certain securities. That alert lists the SEC personnel locator, (202) 551-6000, as the way to confirm whether a caller works there.

Urgency is the lever that keeps the second check from happening, which is the pattern behind a pressured market post.

Steps: reach the firm by a route the contact did not supply

The discipline is one rule with five steps: every contact detail comes from the record, never from the person being checked.

  1. Type the regulator's address yourself and search the firm and the individual name. Starting from a link in the message reaches whatever the sender controls.
  2. Read the registration status, the dates and the disclosure section rather than stopping at the name match (BrokerCheck).
  3. For an adviser, open the most recent Form ADV in the SEC's Investment Adviser Public Disclosure system and note the telephone number, website and address printed in the filing (SEC adviser data).
  4. Call that number and ask whether the named person works there in the role claimed and is authorized to contact prospective clients on that channel.
  5. Compare the domain, the number and the name against what arrived in the message. A mismatch in any of the three is the answer. FINRA's investor hotline, (800) 289-9999, takes questions about a firm's registration status (BrokerCheck FAQ).

Confirmation that the person exists and works there settles identity and nothing else. What the product does, what it costs and how the arithmetic works are separate questions, and the list worth bringing to that conversation is a different exercise from taking apart a performance claim.

Source references

Primary sources used for this guide. Follow the links for the original scope, definitions and conditions.