A onetime St. Augustine financial adviser is facing an 80-month prison sentence for cheating a former client out of $2 million through a two-year scam that used hundreds of swindles.
U.S. District Judge Jordan Pratt had marshals take Eric J. Stone into custody Wednesday, August 19, after a sentencing hearing where the 43-year-old said his own behavior toward his client appalled him.
“What I’ve done was abhorrent. I’m embarrassed by it,” Stone told the judge. “I have devastated her family, and she does not deserve any of it.”
Stone was a broker and adviser at Fidelity Investments in Jacksonville when he borrowed $30,000 from his client, a woman from Maryland in her 70s,
in 2021. The loan was supposed to be repaid within a month but borrowing from a client was unprofessional, violated company rules and quickly cost Stone a good-paying job in an industry where he’d worked for 13 years.
When his client asked for the money that was due, “rather than telling her the truth and facing the consequences, Mr. Stone lied … which led to the fabrication of a wild saga,” Assistant Federal Defender Kathryn Sheldon told the judge in a memo filed before the sentencing.
A plea agreement that Stone signed in March said Stone created a fake email account to pose as a state investigator and tell the client Stone was facing fines from multiple states because of his conduct at Fidelity. “The defendant convinced Victim 1 that in order for the defendant’s assets to be released … the fines had to be paid first,” said a summary of the case attached to the agreement.
That sent Stone and his client down a rabbit hole of additional payments, new hurdles and new payments to clear those hurdles and open up Stone’s supposedly frozen assets, which the client was told were worth $2.3 million.
Along the way, Stone also created another email account to pose as a real-life Jacksonville attorney, who knew nothing about the scam, and kept his retiree client busy navigating new ways to send money.
Between 2022 and 2024, Stone had the client make more than 600 payments by routes including check, money order, wire, PayPal, Zelle, Bitcoin and prepaid cards, the plea agreement said.
The scam was “quite a bit more personal than a lot of financial crimes we see,” Pratt said.
Stone surrendered his certifications by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority in 2023, an action his lawyer said means he won’t pose a risk of future crimes.
But Assistant U.S. Attorney John Cannizzaro told the judge “Mr. Stone has not leaned any life lesson,” saying he received a text from someone claiming Stone cheated her family out of $1,800 as well.
Cannizzaro told Pratt at least $374,000 of the former client's money appeared to have moved from Stone to an overseas sports-betting website.
Pratt ordered Stone to pay $2,037,103 in restitution to the ex-client and made mental health and substance abuse programming part of his six-year, eight-month sentence.
This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: $2 million swindle costs St. Johns ex-broker 80-month sentence
