The SECP has issued a warning to the general public to be careful of the fraudulent companies, non-corporate entities and individuals unlawfully operating in the financial sector of the country. According to the SECP warning, fraudsters were involved in acquiring huge investments under the garb of fake employment/lottery/real estate companies that robbed the public through scams in loans & deposits, spurious brokerages & multi-level marketing, cheating through post, emails, phone calls and various other methods. It is a general belief that our regulatory bodies like SBP, SECP, CDA, KDA etc only wake up after the whole floods have passed under bridges. A housing project was announced in Rawalpindi in 1993 quoting an NOC number from the Rawalpindi Development Authority (RDA) in its newspaper advertisements. Can you believe that the RDA woke up after 7 years in 2000 to warn the people to be careful as it had issued no such NOC to the advertiser? The present SCEP warning is welcome but merely issuing routine press warnings without indicting the culprits, thus in effect safeguarding such culprits, is like the RDA warning the public after 7 years. It ensures that fraudsters have wrung out the maximum from public and nothing more is to be done. Had there been a real interest in plight of the common man, instead of a press release type warning, a paid-public-notice containing names of all such spurious organisations and individuals would have appeared in newspapers and would have appeared repeatedly. -JAVED, Karachi, May 4.