When Karen Robinson’s husband died, she worried she wouldn’t have enough money to raise her two young girls and save for retirement. Then she met a financial planner, Tom Parks, who told her about investment partnerships that would allow her to ride the boom in U.S. oil and gas production while receiving a steady stream of payments to help pay her bills. “He showed me this picture of the United States, and said they were getting oil out of shale, and energy was the way to go,” says Robinson, a high school teacher from Cranfills Gap, Texas. She liked that Parks seemed so confident. “I trusted him.” Two years later, her partnerships have plunged in value and Robinson has lost more than half of the $202,000 she invested, according to a complaint filed with regulators against Parks and his firm, Ameriprise Financial […]