A financial advisor stole $4 million from his brokerage clients, including the entire life savings of a widow, and used most of the money for himself, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission complaint released Friday.

John C. Maccoll, who was a registered representative of UBS Financial Services and an investment advisor, is charged both criminally and civilly with defrauding 15 of his brokerage clients, most of them elderly and retired, in a scheme that lasted for a decade, the SEC said. The U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan filed the criminal charges. He was fired by UBS in March.

Maccoll, a resident of Rochester Hills, Mich., was with the Birmingham, Mich., branch office of UBS. Between 2008 and 2018, he used high-pressure sales tactics to convince his retail brokerage customers to invest in what he described as a highly sought after private fund investment, the SEC complaint said. The victims were convinced to sell their retirement accounts or borrow against them and make out checks to Maccoll, the SEC said.

One customer’s account included her life savings and money from her deceased husband’s life insurance payout, which she intended to use to pay for college expenses for her three children, the complaint said, adding that Maccoll knew that the funds invested in his customers’ accounts were for retirement or college expenses.

After one client began asking questions last spring, and could not obtain reasonable explanations from Maccoll, the client contacted Finra. Maccoll was then fired by UBS and barred from associating with a broker-dealer by Finra. At one point, Maccoll sent an 11-page letter to Finra confessing to the fraud, the SEC said.

Maccoll told his customers that the purported fund investment would allow them to diversify their portfolios, receive annual investment returns as high as 20 percent and give them investment growth potential that was better than the growth they received in their brokerage accounts, the complaint said.

He also told them the offer was only being made to a select few of his clients.

However, Maccoll did not invest the customers' money but stole it for his own personal use, the SEC said. To conceal the scheme, Maccoll allegedly instructed his customers not to tell others about the purported fund investment, provided some of his customers with fake account statements reflecting fictitious returns and paid over $400,000 in Ponzi-like payments to certain of the customers to keep the scheme alive.

The SEC's complaint was filed in federal district court in the Eastern District of Michigan on Thursday.