A former Wells Fargo advisor was sentenced to two years in prison and ordered to pay $158,960 in restitution for committing aggravated identity theft after he stole money from the accounts of elderly victims.

Tyler Michael Rigsbee, 33, of Cameron Park, Calif., was sentenced in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California. The court documents described him as financial advisor once registered through the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority with a major U.S. bank in Sacramento, identified as Wells Fargo through Finra’s BrokerCheck page.

The court said that over two years, Rigsbee stole $158,960 from two elderly customers. According to an earlier plea agreement, after one of the elderly account holders had died in 2018, Rigsbee stole $113,160 from the client’s account in March 2019 by using the name of the account holder’s nephew to fraudulently transfer funds into an E-Trade account Rigsbee controlled, and these were later deposited into Rigsbee’s personal bank account. Rigsbee stole $45,800 from a second client’s account incrementally, a few thousand dollars at a time from May 2020 to February 2021 after setting up an E-Trade account in the client’s name and these were then placed into Rigsbee’s own personal bank account. Rigsbee tried to conceal the scheme by stealing $16,700 from a third elderly customer. The U.S. Attorney’s office said this transaction was flagged and the funds reverted.

“Because he funneled this stolen money through E-Trade brokerage accounts (and the funds earned stock investments during that time), Rigsbee ultimately pocketed $161,577.50 from his scheme, which is $2,615.31 more than what he stole from the elderly customers’ accounts,” said the complaint filed by Phillip A. Talbert, the United States attorney for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of California.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation was involved in the investigation, and the case was prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Elliot C. Wong, according to a statement by the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

According to his BrokerCheck page, Rigsbee was with Wells Fargo from 2016 to 2021, and before that worked with Edward Jones for two years. He was barred by Finra in July 2021 after his firm alerted regulators through a U5 form that documents appeared to show client funds had been received in his personal bank account.