EL PASO, Texas (KFOX14/CBS4) — A former Morgan Stanley financial advisor in El Paso was sentenced in a federal court on Thursday to 12 years in prison for committing a multi-million dollar fraud scheme.
According to court documents, from May 2018 to August 2021, Jesus Rodriguez de la Cruz, 46, defrauded his financial services employer, Morgan Stanley, and clients of money through materially false pretenses, representations and promises.
Rodriguez de la Cruz orchestrated fraudulent transfers of funds from the bank accounts of Morgan Stanley and clients to other bank accounts for his own benefit.
In one instance, Rodriguez de la Cruz created false communications and documents impersonating a client and submitted them to Morgan Stanley personnel to cause fraudulent transfers on the client’s line of credit account for personal profit.
One of these included a form that falsely claimed the client had verbally authorized the transfer of $48,575.36 for the purchase of real estate in El Paso.
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Relying on the documentation, Morgan Stanley initiated the wire transfer from the client’s account to an account at a separate financial institution belonging to one of Rodriguez de la Cruz’s family members.
One fraudulent transfer of approximately $125,000 from a client’s account to an account at another financial institution facilitated Rodriguez de la Cruz’s purchase of a Lamborghini.
Rodriguez de la Cruz committed similar acts using other Morgan Stanley client accounts.
In all, Morgan Stanley suffered a total loss of $5,554,968.10 due to Rodriguez de la Cruz’s scheme.
Additionally, Rodriguez de la Cruz did not report any of the embezzled funds as income on his tax returns from 2017 through 2021, causing a loss of $408,055 for the IRS.
Rodriguez de la Cruz was indicted by a federal grand jury in December 2023 and arrested on Jan. 12, 2024.
He pleaded guilty on Nov. 5, 2024, to one count of wire fraud, one count of engaging in a monetary transaction over $10,000 using criminally derived proceeds, one count of aggravated identity theft, and one count of making and subscribing a false income tax return.
This defendant abused the trust of his clients and his responsibilities as a financial advisory to steal millions of dollars in customer funds in order to enrich himself,” said Acting U.S. Attorney Margaret Leachman for the Western District of Texas. “Today’s sentence of more than a decade in federal prison demonstrates that perpetrators of fraud in this district will be investigated and brought to justice.
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