Former Fidelity Advisor Is Headed to Prison for Stealing From Elderly Client

Key Points

• Former Fidelity Investments advisor Eric Stone was sentenced to six years and eight months in prison for stealing over $2 million from a client.
• Prosecutors said Stone convinced the 75-year-old victim to make over 600 transactions based on bogus emails and spent the money on gambling sites.
• Stone was ordered to pay $2,037,103 in restitution and had previously been barred from the industry by Finra in 2023.

A former Fidelity Investments advisor has been sentenced to six years and eight months in prison for stealing more than $2 million from an elderly client. Eric Stone, 43, of St. Augustine, Fla., pleaded guilty to wire fraud and money laundering in March.

In addition to the prison sentence, Eric Stone was ordered to repay $2,037,103 in restitution. Photo: Andrew Unangst/Dreamstime

Prosecutors say that Stone befriended a 75-year-old client and convinced her to make more than 600 transactions over a three-year-period, basing the requests on bogus emails purportedly from lawyers, banks, and websites that he sent her seeking money. Stone spent most of the money on foreign gambling websites, according to the Justice Department.

“Our seniors are among our nation’s most vulnerable population and must be protected,” says U.S. Attorney Gregory Kehoe. “The defendant in this case used his position of trust to deliberately deceive and exploit the victim for his own personal gain.”

Stone’s lawyer, Kathryn Sheldon, referred a request for comment to a contact form on the website of the federal public defender office for Florida’s Middle District. “Because this is still an open case and given our confidentiality requirements, we will let the sentencing proceeding speak for itself,” a representative of the office says. Stone was seeking a sentence of six years, followed by three years of supervised release.

He began his brokerage career with Fidelity in 2008, according to registration records. In 2021, the firm fired him for allegedly soliciting loans from clients, including the victim of the fraud that resulted in his criminal conviction. In 2023, the brokerage industry’s self-regulator Finra barred him from the industry after he failed to produce documents and testify on the record in an investigation into his termination. Finra noted that after a due date in the investigation lapsed, Stone submitted a statement with some of the information investigators requested, but that important materials remained outstanding.

Fidelity didn’t immediately provide a comment on Stone’s sentencing.

Stone’s record in the online database BrokerCheck indicates that he was subject to a judgment or lien of nearly $34,000 in a tax case in 2020. In 2023, he settled a customer dispute involving an allegedly unpaid loan to a client for $38,400. In another dispute that is still unsettled, a customer is seeking $2.7 million that she claims she lent to Stone, most of which she says she lent him after his termination from Fidelity.

In a sentencing memorandum, Sheldon, Stone’s lawyer, acknowledged that he had solicited a loan of $30,000 from the victim in March 2021. “This was [a] completely inappropriate, although not illegal, request,” she wrote. She explained that he was in the midst of a divorce and “ostensibly trying to set up a new home for himself and his family.” That loan got him fired from Fidelity, and the loss of income coupled with substantial alimony payments left him unable to repay the client, Sheldon said in the sentencing memo.

“Rather than telling her the truth and facing the consequences, Mr. Stone lied to her, which led to the fabrication of a wild saga, whereby convincing [the victim] to send him over $2 million over the course of three years,” Sheldon wrote. “During this time, Mr. Stone’s behavior completely changed from the once-loving father and trusted advisor to a predatory thief.”

In addition to the prison sentence, Stone was ordered to repay $2,037,103 in restitution. In the sentencing memo, Sheldon said that Stone was committed to repaying his former client “to the fullest extent possible, recognizing that the harm he caused extends far beyond financial loss.”

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