By Stan Clarke, January 29, 2026
Dear Friend and Clients,
Joyce and I recently received in our Canada Post snail mail a letter from an organization called C.I.R.O., the Canadian Investment Regulatory Organization, “CIRO”. We have become aware that many Mirador clients have received the same letter. The letter was to inform us that our personal information was stolen from the CIRO database last August, 2025. This was both a huge shock and disappointment to us.
CIRO was formed in 2023 and was an amalgamation of the Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada (IIROC), and the Mutual Fund Dealers Association (MFDA). These two organizations were self-regulatory organizations for the investment dealers (stock brokers) and the mutual fund salespeople/financial planners. The association had many similarities, so they amalgamated in order to achieve less regulatory duplication, and to gain economies of scale for better efficiency and cost control.
Mirador Corporation was started in 2012 and has had no membership or association with these organizations. But many of you have had accounts under the advice or management of Stan Clarke when he was an employee of these IIROC registered firms:
The hack involved 750,000 accounts. Yes, it sounds like a lot of accounts, but when you consider the number of large bank owned investment dealers and how many accounts they have, and the large number of financial planning/mutual fund sales organizations and their total accounts, it is likely a small percent of the Canadian population. According to CIRO, no fraud or abuse of the stolen data has occurred. Nevertheless, it is both annoying and disturbing. Simply the fact that we are not receiving correspondence until five months after-the-fact is shameful. To echo this feeling and more, the following is a link to an article by an investment advisory publication:
CIRO’s breach is a data-governance failure — not an IT glitch | Advisor.ca
To summarize, neither Stan Clarke, as an employee of any of the above organizations, nor Mirador, has been in any regulatory investigations or has any current associations with the above organizations, so why is any of ours, or our client data, held by them? I suspect there will be further investigation into CIRO and possible legal fallout.
The following is a publication from the Alberta Securities Commission (ASC), which is Mirador’s only regulatory association. This article outlines various common phishing schemes and other uses of illegally acquired information:
Your best protection is to familiarize yourself with the information in this article and remain aware of these scams, so you don’t fall prey to them.
Most importantly, don’t give ANY personal, tax, or financial information to anyone unless you are in the building of a legitimate financial organization and TALKING FACE-to-FACE with one of their clearly identified and qualified representatives.
Also, just for your information, every Monday as registrants with the ASC, both Joyce and I receive from them a summary of disciplinary and regulatory issues. If you have investments with anyone or any organization that is not registered with the ASC, you may be at an increased risk of fraud and financial loss.
Here is one additional recommendation based on our personal experience; Do not buy anything on Kijiji, Facebook, or any other internet service (so far Amazon has been an exception). Also, using services such as PayPal, Shopify, or Shop Pay seems to help by keeping less of your information with the actual vendor, which they might sell or misuse.
With regards to the letter you MAY have from CIRO, at this time, we recommend you do not call and register with the two credit agencies they are suggesting, until Joyce and I have completed further research on the situation. Your call to them will go to a call center, this will be annoying to deal with, and they will ask for personal information that I would not be comfortable providing to them.
We will send another correspondence out once we have completed our research.
Meanwhile, trust that we are in “high vigilance mode”. We are “on this” personally, and on your behalf. Mirador is exceptionally careful with your and our information, and we strongly believe our custodian RBCIS is exceptionally careful as well.
As always, call me with any questions, comments, or concerns.
Sincerely,
Stan
403-608-4664
stan@miradorwealth.com