Citigroup broker indicted for swindling elderly clients
A former Citigroup broker swindled elderly investors out of more than $11 million in retirement savings after he made bad bets on the stock market, according to a criminal indictment unsealed on Wednesday.
New York Attorney General Barbara Underwood — in her first press conference since she succeeded Eric Schneiderman, who resigned this month amid a slew of lurid sex abuse allegations — charged ex-investment adviser Dean Mustaphalli with 99 counts of securities fraud, grand larceny, forgery, and fabricating business documents.
The victims included nurses, shopkeepers and municipal workers, and they all had given the majority of their cash — in many cases well into six figures — to Mustaphalli, Underwood said. They’ve only gotten back 20 cents on the dollar.
“They has played by the rules, putting away a few dollars here and there, to make sure they had enough for a relatively comfortable retirement,” Underwood said at the press conference in downtown Manhattan. “They were not big-time investors.”
Mustaphalli, 48, allegedly forged clients’ signatures in order to funnel their cash into his own hedge fund. The Queens manager had even made up email addresses for some of the retirees, even though a few didn’t know how to use a computer, Underwood said.
But Mustaphalli made bad, complex investments — including a wrong-way bet on the price of MasterCard’s stock using options — and ended up losing as much as 98 percent of the money.
The charges are an escalation of enforcement against Mustaphalli. Last year, then-AG Schneiderman filed a civil suit against the broker for defrauding clients.
Mustaphalli faces as much as 20 years behind bars for the criminal charges.