A Louisiana couple has been charged with defrauding clients out of $4.5 million through a cherry-picking scheme, the Securities and Exchange Commission announced Monday. The complaint is part of a nationwide initiative by the SEC to stop this type of fraud.

The SEC filed a complaint against Wesley Kyle Perkins, his wife Priscilla Gilmore Perkins of Lafayette, La., and the RIA firm they co-owned, World Tree Financial. The complaint was filed Monday in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana.

This is the sixth civil action filed within the last few months arising out of a recently created enforcement initiative to combat cherry-picking frauds, in which advisors keep favorable trades for themselves or particular clients and assign losing trades to disfavored clients. The initiative is led by the SEC's Los Angeles Regional Office and supported by the agency's Division of Economic and Risk Analysis.

In the Louisiana case, the SEC said the couple and the firm created an omnibus account to trade securities. Instead of allocating the purchases and sales equitably among clients, which they claimed to be doing, they took the profits from the favorable sales for themselves and for chosen clients, while assigning the losing investments to disfavored clients, the agency said.

In similar case announced earlier in September, the SEC filed fraud charges against Michael A. Bressman of Montville, N.J. Bressman kept winning trades for himself and family members and gave losing investments to clients. He gained $700,000 in illicit profits over a six-year period, the SEC said.

The Perkinses’ alleged scheme unfolded over a four-year period ending in 2015. During that time, World Tree Financial managed between $40 million and $70 million in assets. The firm was owned 60 percent by Wesley Perkins, who was CEO, and 40 percent by his wife, who was chief financial officer and chief compliance officer.

Clients were told the couple did not have investments in any of the same securities as the clients, which was untrue, the SEC said. Most of the clients were not wealthy. However, the trading losses were assigned to a multi-millionaire client who would not immediately notice the loss, according to the complaint.

The SEC is asking that the couple and the firm be ordered to return the ill-gotten money and that they pay punitive damages.