Before you trust them, read what is already published.
Type a company, a brokerage or a person. 4orm routes the name into the public registers Canadian regulators maintain, tells you what a hit in each one would mean, and keeps a dated record that you did the reading.
The value is the route and the record, not an opinion of ours.
A search that told you a named company was dangerous, on our say so, would be worth nothing to you and a great deal of trouble to us both. So this does something more useful.
4orm does not keep a register of accused companies.
There is no 4orm blacklist, no score and no opinion of ours attached to any firm. A list like that would be a private accusation, and a private accusation is worth less to you than a public finding.
Every result traces to an authority that published it.
Each register named here belongs to a regulator or a federal agency. You open it, you read what they wrote, and you keep their words rather than ours. If the register is silent, that silence is the answer.
The check becomes a dated line on your file.
What you read, and when. If a firm later tells a different story about what you were told at the outset, the record already holds the date you did your own reading.
Four things worth knowing before you type a name.
Absence is the finding people miss
A firm taking money for a financial product in Canada is meant to appear on a register somewhere. The most common shape of a bad one is not a firm with a black mark. It is a firm with no entry at all, a good website, and an answer ready for why.
A licence is a starting point, not a verdict
Licensed and penalized are not opposites. Plenty of registered firms carry a published penalty, and the register is what lets you hold both facts at once and ask about the second one before you sign.
Search the person as well as the firm
People move between firms and the record follows the person. A brokerage with a spotless name can employ an advisor carrying a finding from three years and two employers ago.
Read the method, then read the name
Most people are taken by a method rather than by a company. Pressure to move fast, a return that does not move with the market, a request to send funds somewhere that is not the firm. The Anti-Fraud Centre publishes what is being used on people this month.
A check is worth more when it is on the record.
Reading a register protects you on the day. Holding the dated record of what you read, beside the transaction it belongs to, protects you for the years afterwards. That is the rest of 4orm.