Protecting What You Have Built
A client of ours invested over $100,000 with a company calling itself FX Revenues. She had chosen not to discuss it with us beforehand, acknowledging later that she had expected we would say no. The investment portal showed consistent growth. When she asked to withdraw, FX Revenues cited contract terms requiring a minimum number of trades, then demanded additional funds to release the original investment. When her bank confirmed it was a scam, FX Revenues stopped responding. The money was gone.
This is not a story about someone naive or careless. It is a story about an analytical, capable person who encountered a fraud designed to pass scrutiny, and it did, until it was too late.
Financial losses from fraud and manipulation are now large enough to be a material retirement risk. Total scam-related losses in New Zealand reached approximately $3 billion in the year to March 2025, equivalent to nearly 0.75 percent of GDP. Nearly a quarter of New Zealand adults reported losing money to scams in the previous twelve months. The reported figures represent only a fraction of what actually occurs, because most people who are defrauded do not report it.
The third category of financial risk
Financial planning has always recognised two categories of risk. Market risk: the value of your investments falls. And behavioural risk: you make poor decisions under pressure. Both are well understood and managed.
There is a third category that most plans do not include, and it is the one growing fastest. Fraud, manipulation, and digital vulnerability are responsible for losses large enough to change retirement outcomes. Unlike market risk, it does not appear in your portfolio reporting. Unlike behavioural risk, it is not something an adviser can observe by watching how you respond to volatility. It can happen quickly or slowly, and it is often not identified until the damage is done.
We call it financial security erosion. It belongs in the planning conversation as a permanent fixture, not an occasional warning.
Who is actually at risk
The persistent belief that fraud victims are naive, elderly, or careless is not supported by the evidence. It is also one of the reasons fraud is so effective. The assumption that you would know better is itself a risk factor.
Investment fraud disproportionately affects people who have accumulated wealth, because they are the ones worth targeting.
Romance fraud disproportionately affects people who are lonely or recently bereaved.
Digital account takeover affects people who have not kept pace with security practice, which describes a large proportion of the population regardless of education or professional background.
In New Zealand, people aged eighteen to forty were involved in nearly half of reported online fraud losses.
Analytically minded professionals with accumulated assets are not a protected demographic. They are a target demographic, sought out precisely because they have something worth taking and the confidence to engage with what looks like a credible opportunity.
What AI is changing
The old test ran roughly as: does this look and sound like something real? That test no longer provides the protection it once did. Voice cloning can reproduce a familiar voice from a short audio sample. Deepfake video can simulate a trusted face in a video call. AI-generated text is now indistinguishable from human writing. The protections that work are procedural ones: verification steps that a fraudster cannot replicate regardless of how convincing the approach appears.
Carey received one of these calls. An unknown number, a scratchy line. The caller identified themselves as calling from Kiwibank about a suspicious transaction. She kept asking which account. She had to ask them three times before they deviated from their script. When they said it was her cheque account, she told them she did not have a cheque account with Kiwibank and ended the call.
The lesson is not that she was clever. The lesson is that the call was plausible enough that she engaged with it at all, and that the protection came from asking a specific question they could not answer. Most people would not have asked that question three times.
What goes into a plan on this
Fraud and digital protection have traditionally been excluded from the financial planning conversation. They belong in the plan itself, reviewed annually alongside insurance, estate planning, and investment strategy.
Practically, this means a few things. A trusted contact person, someone your adviser can reach if they have concerns about unusual activity, distinct from a power of attorney. A family safe word that can verify identity when someone calls claiming to be a family member in difficulty. Two-factor authentication on every account connected to financial information. And a verification habit: any request to transfer money, regardless of who it appears to come from, gets verified by calling back on a number sourced independently.
We now ask everyone we work with what they would like us to do if we ever believe they are being scammed and they are not willing to listen to us. Most people nominate someone immediately. That conversation is now a standard part of how we plan.
The white paper
Our white paper, Protecting What You Have Built, goes through the five main threat categories in detail: investment fraud, impersonation, romance and relationship manipulation, digital account takeover, and imposter websites. It includes the full account of a client who made forty-two separate cash withdrawals into cryptocurrency ATMs over several months before we were able to intervene, and what that situation taught us about the structural protections that matter.
It also includes a financial security checklist with fifteen specific actions covering account security, planning protections, and verification habits, which you can work through at your next review.
The assets you have built represent decades of careful decisions. Protecting them from financial security erosion deserves the same attention as growing them, and it belongs in the same planning conversation.
Download the white paper from the link below.
