This is not good advice. "Wealth managers" are totally useless and exist just to charge you fees and create complexity. I really like mgummelt's comment above; it doesn't have to be more complicated than that!
This is not good advice. "Wealth managers" are totally useless and exist just to charge you fees and create complexity. I really like mgummelt's comment above; it doesn't have to be more complicated than that!
If you're worried about a malevolent actor who's willing to commit fraud and openly lie, well, how do you deal with trust for any other kind of professional? Reputation, credentials, reviews, referrals, word-of-mouth, etc.
You can also seek advice from someone independent of handing them your money to invest. You can ask an advisor to tell you what you ought to be doing with a self-directed brokerage account at another firm. I guess it's not impossible that there could be an elaborate scheme to collect commissions even across institutions, but again, you need some sort of trust for the whole project to make any sense.
Either way qualifying any form of professional counsel as "a scam" seems a bit excessive, and also bad avice.
Also, you mention the term "financial advisor". I urge people to remember that there are different kinds of those, including those who know shit and care even less, and all they want is to sign you up to some financial MLM scheme. Source: I know some of the latter kind personally.