Reports received by FINMA

FINMA receives hundreds of reports of potentially unauthorised activities every year and has to focus on the more serious cases.

How you can protect yourself

FINMA does not have the resources to monitor the financial market proactively for unauthorised activities and can only act when it obtains specific information. It receives several hundred such reports every year, many of them from individuals using the FINMA Public web portal, and also obtains information from the media, criminal prosecution authorities and foreign supervisory authorities.

Reports prioritised systematically

To process all the information it receives, FINMA must systematically set priorities. It gives top priority to information that might indicate a serious case of unauthorised activity, since this could:

involve failure to follow key authorisation requirements;
impact a large number of investors and/or considerable amounts of investments;
entail serious risks for invested assets.

Investigations subject to official secrecy

Individuals who report information to FINMA about possible unauthorised activities cannot expect to be kept informed about the progress of the case. FINMA is bound by official secrecy and, in principle, cannot give third parties any details about its investigations. Therefore, when asked, FINMA neither confirms nor denies that investigations are in progress.