Watchdog sniffs out deceptive ads
A company that claimed to show people how to make returns of 100 per cent in three months has been set upon by the corporate watchdog for publishing misleading advertising.
The Australian Securities and Investments Commission obtained court orders to force Western Australian-based company Capital Intelligence to retract its ads, which also claimed that investors’ money would be made from trading shares, when the company was actually trading contracts for difference.
Capital Intelligence has been ordered to contact every person who has given it money in the past and clarify the true nature of the investment process.
The company will also have to print corrective ads in a swathe of metropolitan newspapers spread across most Australian capital cities.
The forced retraction comes just a month after Newcastle-based financial planning firm Forsythes Financial Services was ordered by ASIC to pull one of its ads from a newspaper for making misleading claims.
ASIC said the ad made representations about future matters without having reasonable grounds for making them.
It also made future representations about fund returns based on projections and assumptions that were not stated and, in some cases, likely to be unreliable.
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