Christopher Liew: How to tell if your financial advice comes from the wrong place

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Christopher Liew is a CFP®, CFA Charterholder and former financial advisor. He writes personal finance tips for thousands of daily Canadian readers at Blueprint Financial.

Scroll through your phone for five minutes and you’ll get more money advice than your grandparents heard in a lifetime. Some of it is useful. A lot of it comes from people with zero accountability, a product to sell, or in some cases, is not even a real person at all.

I love that Canadians are more curious about their money than ever. What worries me is where so much of that curiosity is being fed. Below, I’ll walk through how to tell if your financial advice is coming from the wrong place, and where to look instead.

More advice, less accountability

As someone with an active following on YouTube, I paid very close attention to this. In December 2025, the Canadian Securities Administrators and the Canadian Investment Regulatory Organization jointly published new guidance on how securities laws apply to social media finfluencers and the firms that pay them. Regulators don’t write 13-page notices about trends they consider harmless.

And the concern is backed by hard data. An OSC survey found that about 35 per cent of Canadian retail investors had made a financial decision based on a finfluencer’s advice, and the people who did were 12 times more likely to have been scammed online.

Roughly one in 10 Canadians now get money advice from social media, according to a federal Financial Consumer Agency of Canada survey, and among those aged 18 to 34, that jumps to 18 per cent. Plenty of those people are making smart money moves, and plenty of others are following strangers off a cliff.

Ask whether they’re allowed to give advice

In Canada, to give personalized investment advice or sell investment products, you usually have to be registered or licensed with a securities regulator. A registered advisor or credentialed planner answers to a regulator and a code of conduct. A random account posting daily stock picks often answers to no one.

And some corners of the money world are barely policed at all. Crypto promoters, prediction markets, and similar pitches tend to operate with far less oversight, which is exactly where I get most skeptical.

So protect yourself by checking the person out. If someone claims a designation like a CFP or CFA, make sure they’re actually in good standing with the body that issues it.

Follow the money before you follow the advice

Whenever I see a hot tip online, my first question is simple: how does this person get paid? Free advice is rarely free.

Some creators earn through undisclosed paid promotions, affiliate links, or by steering you toward a paid course or private community. That’s exactly the behaviour regulators are now targeting. In 2025, the Alberta Securities Commission banned a finfluencer and his company from the province’s capital markets for two years and fined them $30,000 for promoting stocks without clearly disclosing that the posts were paid advertisements.

A vague disclaimer like “I may have a financial interest” doesn’t cut it anymore. If you can’t easily tell who is paying for the message you’re watching, it’s safest to assume someone is, and that their interests may not match yours.

Be especially careful with AI-generated and ‘guaranteed’ content

This problem is newer, and it’s escalating fast. We’re now seeing deepfake videos of real public figures, plus entirely synthetic “advisors,” pushing investment schemes that promise guaranteed or sky-high returns.

Let me be blunt: no legitimate professional promises guaranteed returns. Markets simply don’t work that way, and anyone who claims otherwise is either uninformed or very likely running a scam. Investment fraud is now the costliest category of fraud in this country. Canadians reported a record $704 million in total fraud losses in 2025, with investment fraud the single largest category by dollars lost, and a large share of those pitches begin on social media.

If a clip pressures you to act immediately, or dangles a return that sounds too good to be true, it almost always is.

Match the advice to your situation, not someone else’s highlight reel

Even good advice can be wrong for you. A strategy that fits a 25-year-old renter can be a costly mistake for a 55-year-old nearing retirement, and most viral content is built for clicks, not for your circumstances.

This is the biggest gap I see. Before acting on anything, you need a clear picture of where you actually stand: your income, debts, taxes, time horizon, and goals. I broke down how Canadians stack up financially in a recent Blueprint Financial video on the seven levels of wealth, which is a helpful way to identify the stage you’re really in before chasing tips meant for someone else. Real financial freedom starts with your own numbers, not a copy-paste of someone else’s plan.

Final thoughts

The internet has made financial knowledge more accessible than ever, and that’s a good thing. The real problem isn’t social media itself, it’s outsourcing your decisions to strangers who carry none of the consequences. Use free content to spark questions, then verify anything that matters with a qualified, registered source before you act. A few extra minutes of homework can save you years of regret.