A barred investment advisor from Red Bank, N.J., who admitted swindling elderly and disabled clients out of more than $625,000 to fund a gambling habit was sentenced to 3½ years in federal prison this week.

Mario E. Rivero Jr., 39, a former Wells Fargo dually registered investment advisor representative who had an office in Elizabeth, N.J., must serve out the entire term because there is no parole for federal convictions, the Daily Voice of Middlesex County, N.J., reported.

Rivero, who was also sentenced on Tuesday to three years of supervised parole following his prison time, convinced five clients to transfer $626,478 to his personal bank accounts, according to a guilty plea he submitted in February in U.S. District Court in Newark.

Rivero worked for Wells Fargo from December 2010 to September 2020, when he switched to LPL Financial. In June 2021, he was barred by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, according to BrokerCheck.

Rivero induced five elderly and/or disabled clients to transfer a total of $626,478 from their brokerage accounts at Wells Fargo to their personal bank accounts. The fraud took place from April 2018 through November 2020, according to a complaint brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission in March 2022.

The SEC said Rivero directed clients to get cashier’s checks payable to three entities to which he was secretly associated. Two of those entities were owned by a close relative and one by a friend, the complaint said

Rivero told his clients that the fund transfers were for investment purposes, including the stock market, the complaint said.

“In reality, Rivero siphoned hundreds of thousands of dollars from the entities that received the investor funds for his own benefit,” according to the SEC, which noted that he never told his clients that he would personally benefit from the transactions with the entities and that they were not legitimate investment vehicles.

The complaint said Rivero transferred funds from bank accounts held by the entities to accounts he owned, including his personal brokerage account, PayPal accounts in his name, and bank accounts that he controlled, the complaint said. “Over scores of separate transactions, Rivero received hundreds of thousands of dollars in illicit funds from the Rivero Affiliated Companies,” the complaint said.

Rivero repeated the fund transfers scheme more than a dozen times while his clients were unaware that he was reaping substantial portion of their investment funds, the complaint said.

The scheme began to unravel after Rivero provided two of the investors, siblings who held a joint account, a fake account statement in December 2020. The statement, the complaint said, was for a purported brokerage account in the siblings’ names and reflected that Rivero had invested the funds in the stock market on their behalf. But the complaint said the brokerage account was a sham.

Rivero used the funds to gamble and for personal items, the SEC and the Department of Justice’s complaint alleged.

After a 10-year career with Wells Fargo, he left the broker-dealer amid an investigation by the New Jersey Securities Department, which was followed by federal criminal charges, according to the Daily Voice.

Rivero was arrested in March 2022 at his home, according to the news website. Both FINRA and the SEC barred him, according to his BrokerCheck record.