On 20 August the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Middle District of Florida announced that Eric James Stone, 43, of St. Augustine, had been sentenced to six years and eight months in federal prison and ordered to pay $2,037,103 in restitution.
He was a financial advisor. According to the release, he used that position to befriend a 75-year-old woman, and over roughly three years he convinced her to make over 600 transactions.
Eight days earlier, the Southern District of Indiana announced a three-year sentence and $381,400.05 in restitution against Teresa Palmer, 55, who had managed a credit union branch in Columbus. Court documents describe hundreds of unauthorised transactions across four customer accounts over two years. One of the account holders had dementia.
Take the arithmetic seriously for a moment. Six hundred transactions across thirty-six months is roughly seventeen a month. Spread over four accounts and twenty-four months, Palmer's "hundreds" resolve to something similar. These are not the numbers of a raid. They are the numbers of a routine.
That is what makes them hard. Detection systems are built to find the outlier — the amount that does not fit, the destination that has never appeared before, the hour nobody transacts at. A sequence of small, unremarkable movements defeats that design: the person authorising them is the pattern the system measures against.
FBI Indianapolis Special Agent in Charge Timothy J. O'Malley described the selection criterion in the Palmer case directly: she targeted customers "she believed were less likely to regularly monitor their accounts or discover the theft."
The other thing worth noticing is how each case actually surfaced. In Indiana it was a customer's daughter, reporting unauthorised activity in her father's account after the credit union had already terminated the manager for forging signatures on unrelated paperwork. In Florida the client made every transfer herself, willingly, six hundred times.
Both were found by a person, not by a control. Which suggests the practical question in an insider case is not what a transaction looks like. It is who reads the statement, and how often.
If this is your family
Ask who actually reads your parent's bank and investment statements each month — not who receives them, who reads them. If the honest answer is nobody, offer to go through the last three together, and then keep doing it on a fixed date. You are not looking for one alarming line. You are looking for a rhythm that neither of you can account for.
Sources
St. Augustine Man Sentenced to More Than Six Years in Prison for Defrauding a Senior of More Than $2 Million — U.S. Attorney's Office, Middle District of Florida, 20 August 2026
Former Credit Union Branch Manager Sentenced to Federal Prison for Ripping Off Elderly and Incapacitated Customers — U.S. Attorney's Office, Southern District of Indiana, 12 August 2026