Furthermore, Financial Asset Management is offering consumers the opportunity to open and maintain a securities account. On its website fin-am.com and when contacting consumers, it makes reference to a registered office in Stockholm, Sweden.

In the past, there have been frequent reports of attempted fraud where shares in well-known companies are offered for subscription. However, these shares are not delivered to the clients after payment is made, and the offerors can no longer be reached; in some cases, the offered shares do not even exist.

BaFin, the German Federal Criminal Police Office (Bundeskriminalamt – BKA) and the German state criminal police offices (Landeskriminalämter) therefore recommend that consumers seeking to invest money online should always exercise the utmost caution and do the necessary research beforehand in order to identify attempted fraud at an early stage.

Background information

As a rule, securities may be offered to the public in Germany only if a prospectus has been published. This prospectus must be approved by BaFin prior to publication. Offering securities to the public without an approved prospectus constitutes a violation of the prospectus requirement under Article 3(1) of the EU Prospectus Regulation – unless an exemption applies.

During the prospectus approval process, BaFin checks whether the minimum information required by law is included in the prospectus and whether its content is understandable, coherent and consistent. However, BaFin is not responsible for checking whether the information contained in the prospectus is correct, for assessing the integrity of the issuer, or for monitoring the product in question.

There is currently no valid securities prospectus that has been approved by BaFin in connection with Porsche shares being offered to the public. You can check whether an approved prospectus for an offer of securities to the public has been filed with BaFin, and who is authorised to offer this security to the public, by consulting the Prospectuses filed database on the BaFin website.

Companies that offer to sell securities of other companies to consumers require authorisation from BaFin. The same applies for pre-IPO shares. Information on whether particular companies have been authorised by BaFin can be found in BaFin’s database of companies.