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| Some men rob with a six-gun, some with a fountain pen. |
According to the Associated Press,
The chief executive of an Iowa-based brokerage firm admitted in a tell-all suicide note that he carried out an elaborate fraud scheme in which he embezzled at least $100 million from customers over two decades, federal investigators said Friday.
FBI agents arrested Peregrine Financial Group Inc. Russell Wasendorf Sr. at a local hospital Friday and he appeared in federal court later in the day on charges of lying to federal regulators. Court documents detail a wide-ranging fraud scheme in which Wasendorf apparently fooled colleagues, customers and regulators by creating fraudulent financial records.
Those documents detailed a note found in Wasendorf's car Monday, when authorities found him unresponsive in the vehicle outside the company's headquarters in Cedar Falls. "Through a scheme of using false bank statements I have been able to embezzle millions of dollars from customer accounts," Wasendorf wrote, adding that the fraud had gone undetected "until now."
