FINRA Files Complaint Against Advisor Who Preyed On Elderly Couple

Josh O'Neill

10 November 2016

The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority has filed a complaint against a US-based financial advisor who admitted to attempting to illicitly obtain more than $70,000 from an elderly couple who were “declining both physically and mentally”.

Stanley Niekras, who from 2005 through to 2014 worked for MML Investor Services, a Massachusetts-headquartered broker-dealer and investment advisory firm, told two of his clients - aged 90 and 91 at the time - that he was entitled to $72,636 for purported estate and financial planning services.

Although Niekras did not have a financial planning or investment advisory agreement with the couple, he presented them with documents claiming he had spent “hundreds” of hours over a four-year period working on their “financial future”, at a retrospective rate of $250 per hour.

In 2012, Niekras wrote a “memorandum to file” noting that one of the clients “lacked any understanding of the couple's finances”.

The following year, Niekras met with the above client and tape-recorded their meeting, where he explained that his “company needed to be compensated for the time they kept him on the payroll”, even though at the time, he was not on any company's payroll.

Niekras therefore knew that he was not entitled to such fees and consequently violated FINRA's rules, the regulatory body said in a statement earlier this week.

The regulator's department of enforcement has ordered that one or more of the sanctions provided under FINRA Rule 8310 be imposed and that Niekras pays the costs of proceedings “as are deemed fair and appropriate”.