A former registered rep with Suntrust and M&T was sentenced to 3 1/2 years in prison for stealing more than $1 million from an elderly client over 17 years.
Eddy Ray Blizzard originally pleaded guilty in Maryland federal court to bank fraud in late December and faced a harsher maximum sentence of 30 years. FBI Special Agent in Charge William J. DelBagno said Blizzard deserved “every year” he’d spend behind bars.
“The victim spent his life working diligently, saving for retirement and building an inheritance for his loved ones,” he said. “Blizzard not only stole a million dollars but took away their security and peace of mind.”
According to FINRA records, Blizzard began his career at UBS in 2001 before moving to Allfirst and then M&T in 2003, where he stayed for 11 years before moving to Suntrust in 2014. Suntrust fired him in 2017.
Blizzard’s scheme targeted an unnamed elderly investor with the moniker “R.M.” in court documents. R.M. was a retired air conditioning technician who’d worked at a Baltimore-based company for 30 years.
Six months after retiring, R.M. decided to invest his retirement funds to create an inheritance for his grandchildren and went to M&T, where he held depository accounts. He soon met Blizzard, who began working at M&T shortly after R.M. started to invest and became his advisor.
Blizzard asked R.M. if he would continue working with him if he went independent. He said it would be some time before he had his own office and would continue to work out of the M&T office. But Blizzard never became an independent financial advisor.
Once a month, R.M. would drive an hour from his home in Chester, Md., to meet Blizzard in his car in the parking lot of his M&T office; these meetings would last 30 to 45 minutes and continued for years, with Blizzard never revealing why they were meeting in his car and not an office.
Blizzard began asking R.M. for blank checks, with the client recalling that he had given the advisor about 15-20 signed blank checks. Unbeknownst to R.M., Blizzard used these checks for his own purposes. (Evidence uncovered later indicated he’d used the money for property taxes, construction, boat payments and down payments on a new home.)
At least 12 times, R.M. went to his local bank to withdraw cash, where he was told there wasn’t enough money in the account. R.M. would call Blizzard, who would tell him to wait a day or two, but he didn’t ask why his accounts had no funds.
Things came to a head in 2019 when R.M. prepared for a family vacation, only to find insufficient funds in the account. R.M. tried calling Blizzard for a week without a response before going to his home and knocking on the front and back doors.
While there, R.M. got a call from Blizzard, saying neighbors had called him complaining about the noise. Blizzard said that all of the client’s money was gone, that he’d attempted suicide and was hospitalized. (He later admitted there was no suicide attempt.)
In addition to stealing from R.M.’s retirement funds, Blizzard also pilfered his Social Security income. R.M. also believed that Blizzard was handling the payment of his mortgage, but in the fall of 2019, the man’s home was put into foreclosure because the advisor hadn’t made the mortgage payments.
The following March, R.M. died at the age of 75, according to the Department of Justice.