A Los Angeles investment advisor who swindled a “high-profile athlete” and his wife out of $1.2 million in fees will be sentenced next month for the crime, according to U.S. District Court in Los Angeles.
Jeremy Drake, who formerly was an advisor with HCR Wealth Advisors in Los Angeles, will be sentenced Feb. 20 by U.S. District Court Judge Christina Snyder. He could be ordered to repay double the amount of excess fees he charged the clients, according to the complaint. He could face up to 20 years in jail, according to news reports.
Drake was charged criminally by the U.S. Attorney’s Office and civilly by the Securities and Exchange Commission in the scheme, in which he charged his two clients $1.5 million in fees while purporting to only charge them $300,000 for managing $35 million in assets, the SEC complaint said. The name of the athlete has not been revealed.
Drake went to elaborate lengths to conceal his fraud, including creating and sending false documents and creating a fictitious person to corroborate his lies. The deception continued until the scheme came to light and Drake was fired by HCR Wealth Advisors in 2016. Drake personally received $900,000 of the money, the SEC said.
When the clients first discovered his deception, he warned the wife that reporting his misconduct could result in bad publicity for her husband, the SEC said.
“As alleged in our complaint, these two clients trusted Drake to manage their investments, but all the while Drake was lying to them and then tried to conceal his lies by fabricating documents and even acting as an imposter to back up his claims,” Michele Wein Layne, director of the SEC’s Los Angeles Regional Office, said when the charges were filed in August 2017.