After 18-Month Investigation, OSC Alleges Fraud by BG Wealth Founder
The regulator's application traces the collapse of a 14-property portfolio that included buildings in downtown Owen Sound. First hearing is August 11.
The Ontario Securities Commission’s fraud case against BG Wealth Group founder Craig Dunkerley covers $908,000 and four investors out of at least $11.6 million the regulator has said the group raised.
The Commission filed the application on July 22, ending an investigation that ran more than 18 months. The Capital Markets Tribunal, which hears these cases, set the first appearance for August 11 at 10 a.m. The public can watch by videoconference.
Named alongside Dunkerley are four companies: BGRE Capital Corporation, BG Wealth Group Inc., BG Wealth Group Growth Fund LP and BG Wealth GP Inc. Dunkerley was sole director of three of them and the directing mind of the fourth.
Co-founder Claudia Harvey is not named anywhere in the application.
Regulators build these cases on what they can prove, and a narrower application is not a finding that the rest was proper. But the gap is large, and neither the application nor the Commission’s public statements address it.
The buildings BG Wealth owned in downtown Owen Sound were part of the portfolio the Commission says the group could no longer pay for.
None of the allegations has been proven. The Tribunal has made no findings.
What the Commission says happened
Dunkerley created the BG Wealth Group name around 2019 as a brand for himself and the Ontario real estate companies he controlled. The business model was to buy undervalued properties in growing areas, renovate them, rent them and sell at a profit, financed by money raised from private investors.
Between November 2023 and August 2024, the Commission alleges, Dunkerley and the four companies took about $908,000 from four investors: roughly $103,000, $287,000, $400,000 and $118,000.
Most of it came in through promissory notes paying 16%. Two of those investors handed over money with no note issued at all; their investments simply appeared on portfolio statements the group sent them.
By then, the Commission says, the business was failing.
The collapse, month by month
The application sets out how fast it went.
At the start of November 2023, the group had missed payments on three of its 20 mortgage loans. By the start of January 2024, it had missed payments on 14 of 20. By the start of June 2024, 19 of 20.
It had also stopped making property tax payments on two of its properties, and by November 2023 had largely stopped paying the investors it already had.
The group owned about 14 properties at the time, the Commission says, “in areas such as Owen Sound, Wasaga Beach and Tiny, Ontario.” The Current has documented five of them in downtown Owen Sound.
Beginning in September 2024, the group lost eight properties — five sold under power of sale, three sold after being placed in receivership. It sold two more, one for less than it had paid. At least one other is in a power of sale process.
The application does not identify which properties. Three Owen Sound buildings were sold following the November 2024 receivership of the numbered companies that held them.
What investors were told
The promotional material sent to two of the four investors said the private lending program “beats any bank account or institutional investment product,” and that every $100,000 invested would return $16,000 a year in interest.
Dunkerley told another investor there was a “strong flow of incoming new Capital and Cashflow from the properties,” and that in his experience the risks were “very low.”
He told a fourth: “We payout monthly investment partner payments on the 5th of every month.”
None of the respondents told the investors the group had missed mortgage payments, the Commission alleges, or that it had largely stopped paying the people who had already invested.
Trading continued after the ban
On February 6, 2025, the Commission ordered Dunkerley, Harvey and eight companies to stop trading in securities.
Between February 28 and December 31 last year, the application alleges, Dunkerley and the Growth Fund broke that order 20 times by issuing limited partnership units to investors.
The sums were modest. Most of the units were issued when investors reinvested distributions — roughly US$1,900 and C$43,900 across the two periods — with about US$4,200 in new cash.
BG Wealth GP Inc., the fund’s general partner, was dissolved for non-compliance partway through, on May 25, 2025.
Harvey is out of the case
In January, seeking to extend the trading ban, the Commission stated it had found evidence that Harvey is co-founder and President of BG Wealth Group, and that she served as a director of BG Wealth Group Inc., the Fund Manager and the Fund.
That finding stood in contrast to what Dunkerley had told investors in February 2025 — that Harvey “has never been an owner or corporate director” of the company or its affiliates, and that any link between her and the investigation was false.
Six months later, the application does not mention her once. It describes BG Wealth Group as a name Dunkerley used for himself and companies “controlled by him.”
In a motion filed July 24 in the original file, the Commission asked to keep the trading ban on Dunkerley and the four companies until the case ends. It did not ask to keep it on Harvey, BG Wealth Holdings Corporation, BG Wealth Properties Inc., BG Property Holdings Inc. or Blackthorn Investment Group Inc.
The stated reason is that the application “does not make allegations against them.” That order lapses August 6.
The application does not say Harvey was uninvolved; it is silent on her.
The Tribunal has made no finding either way, and none of the public record has been displaced — the 2021 news release describing her as BG Wealth Group’s Co-Founder and President, her billing as a co-founder on business media and in an industry directory, her joint directorship with Dunkerley of BG Equipment Leasing Inc.
Nor was she a distant figure here. City records obtained by a freedom of information request show staff dealt with her directly about the buildings.
What this case reaches, and what it doesn’t
The harm alleged in this application is to investors. Owen Sound appears in it as a place where the group owned buildings it could no longer pay for.
The four investors are not identified, and nothing suggests any of them are Owen Sound tenants. No individual property is named.
The Commission has no authority over landlords, rents, building conditions or heritage properties. Those fall to the City’s property standards and by-law enforcement, the fire department, and the Landlord and Tenant Board.
Nothing before the Tribunal on August 11 concerns the condition of any building in this city.
Seldon House: The building nothing reached
Of the five downtown properties BG Wealth companies held, the Seldon House/Coach Inn is the only one where arrears run into six figures.
1005 2nd Ave. E. was built as a hotel in 1887. By-law 1984-70 designates its exterior facade, lobby and main staircase under the Ontario Heritage Act. The rooms are not covered.
BG Wealth had promised to turn it into a boutique hotel. In September 2024, it was listed for $3 million.
City tax records show the registered owner as 11968017 Canada Inc., which is not a respondent in the OSC case, and $117,258.50 owing as of February 27, 2026, with arrears reaching back to 2023.
When the receiver notified the City in December 2024, staff recorded three affected properties — 950-956, 942-944 and 948 2nd Ave. E. The Coach Inn was not among them.
In October 2023, long-term residents wrote to the mayor and council. In the letter, released to the Current in redacted form, they said seven of the building’s 40 rooms had no heat and that some had gone without for roughly six years; that windows had been painted shut and broken ones left unreplaced for more than three years; and that rent increases varied between comparable rooms.
They wrote that they had been told BG Wealth Properties would not pay for repairs.
The city clerk forwarded the letter to by-law enforcement, noting that many of the concerns were landlord and tenant matters by-law enforcement could not address.
The letter is dated October 19, 2023. The period covered by the fraud allegation begins the following month.
The companies that held the buildings
None of them is named in the OSC case.
Records released to the Current under a freedom of information request (1,195 pages, partly redacted) show City staff dealt with BG Wealth from 2019 to 2024 predominantly through people using bgwealthproperties.com addresses. BG Wealth Properties Inc. is one of the companies the Commission has now dropped. That correspondence stops in mid-2024; after it, staff are dealing with a receiver and lawyers.
The City’s tax collector described the structure in a November 2024 email: BG Wealth Management is an umbrella company with others underneath it, and no City tax roll is registered in that name. One of them, 10603503 Canada Inc., was solely directed by Dunkerley.
Three of those numbered companies went into receivership in November 2024 after Kindred Credit Union went to court — a proceeding separate from the Commission’s, and one that began first.
Most of the arrears have since been paid off. The 9th Street building sold in late 2024 and $126,724.67 was cleared that December.
Title to 942-944 2nd Ave. E. changed hands in December 2025 with $74,917.33 owing, and the account showed no arrears for any year before 2026 by late February.
Payments of $64,663.69 and $27,326.59 on January 8 brought the two remaining 2nd Avenue accounts to within a few hundred dollars.
What investors were promised these buildings would earn
BG Wealth’s promotional case studies, since removed from its website, claimed the company had lifted gross rental income at 950-956 2nd Ave. E. from $28,800 to $187,692 a year, and at 261-281 9th St. E. from $127,000 to $235,290.
Over the same years, City ledgers show those buildings falling steadily behind on taxes, with water bills rolled onto the tax roll and penalties compounding month after month. In 2024 the City hired a contractor to clear the yard at 950 2nd Ave. E. and billed the cost back to the tax roll.
The numbered companies that held the buildings are legally separate from BG Wealth Group Inc., the company whose finances the Commission alleges were misrepresented.
What the Commission is asking for
A permanent ban on Dunkerley and the four companies trading in or acquiring securities.
An order that Dunkerley resign any position he holds as a director or officer, and a permanent prohibition on holding one again.
An administrative penalty of up to $5 million for each failure to comply.
Repayment of amounts obtained. Costs of the investigation and hearing.
Dunkerley’s position
He has not agreed to an interview at any point in this coverage.
In February 2025, he told investors the Commission’s inquiry came from “a group of dissatisfied investors” and did not reflect wrongdoing, adding: “We remain fully committed to transparency and compliance.”
He has said BG Wealth was not required to register with the Commission because it is a real estate acquisition and management company.
In November 2024 he told the Current by email: “We stay the course and manage our business and properties, and our investors will [be] paid back their investment.”
The application and notice of hearing are posted on the Capital Markets Tribunal website under file number 2026-30. The July 24 motion is filed in the original proceeding, 2025-4.
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