Former University of Virginia football player Merrill Robertson, Jr. has been convicted of running a $10 million Ponzi scheme that victimized more than 60 investors, including former coaches, school alumni, members of his church and community.  

Federal prosecutors in Virginia showed that Robertson, 37, and co-conspirator Sherman Carl Vaughn, 46, used Robertson’s contacts from his football community to entice clients to invest in a nonregistered investment fund that purported to hold successful companies, many of which were defunct or never existed.

Instead, the partners used more than $6 million of the more than $10 million they raised to fund lavish lifestyles that included expensive cars, homes, school tuitions, shopping sprees and spa treatments. In Ponzi scheme fashion, funds collected by the partners were also used to pay back earlier investors.

Robertson is the son of a minister and a former financial advisor at Merrill Lynch, where he was employed from 2009-2010. Vaugh is the son of a former high school principal.

Many of the more than two dozen investors who showed up to Robertson’s sentencing said they believed they were transferring tax-deferred retirement accounts to similar investments at Cavalier Union Investments LLC, the firm the partners created and used over a seven-year period (2010-1016) to run their Ponzi scheme.

At Robertson’s emotional sentencing hearing, longtime UVA assistant football coach Danny Wilmer, 70, who recruited Robertson and who lost almost $500,000 investing with Cavalier, told U.S. District Judge John A. Gibney Jr., “This is really hard, I’m going to tell you,” the Richmond Times-Dispatch reported.

Tommie Sides, a former teacher and coach who now owns his own small business, coached Robertson in basketball at L.C. Bird High School, said he lost more than $373,000 investing with Robertson.

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