A former Morgan Stanley financial advisor in El Paso, Texas, was sentenced 12 years in prison for committing a multi-million-dollar fraud scheme.
According to court documents, Jesus Rodriguez de la Cruz defrauded his employer and clients between May 2018 to August 2021 through a series of 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 – one of these actions 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. The funds were sent to an account belonging to one of Rodriguez de la Cruz’s family members. Another fraudulent transfer of approximately $125,000 from a client’s account to an account at another financial institution enabled Rodriguez de la Cruz’s to purchase a Lamborghini.
In all, Morgan Stanley suffered a total loss of $5,554,968.10 due to Rodriguez de la Cruz’s scheme. Rodriguez de la Cruz also failed to report 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 was arrested in January 2024. He pleaded guilty last November 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 US 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.”
