The quarterly statement said sixteen percent. The fund said nothing at all.

Marlene kept the statements in a green accordion folder on the kitchen desk, the one with the broken latch she meant to fix in 2019. She was sixty-eight. She had retired from Cook County schools two years before, after thirty-one years as a nurse, and she had moved the bulk of her rollover into Sterling Capital because her brother-in-law had moved his there first and showed her his quarterly returns at Thanksgiving.

The Q3 2024 statement arrived on a Tuesday. She opened it at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee and her reading glasses. The line at the top said sixteen percent. The line at the bottom said her account was worth more than it had been at the start of the year. She refilled the coffee. She slid the statement into the folder. She felt, for a moment, the specific calm of a person who has made the right decision.

That statement, federal prosecutors now allege, was fiction. The number on it was a number John Sterling Myers had typed.

I.

The indictment was returned on Thursday, June 4, 2026, in the Northern District of Illinois. The U.S. Attorney's Office announced it Monday morning. Four counts of wire fraud. Each count carries a maximum of twenty years.

The defendant is John Sterling Myers, 41, of Chicago. He ran three entities he solely owned and controlled. Sterling Capital Investments, LLC. Sterling Capital, LLC. Sterling Capital Management, LLC. The names braid together like a hedge, so that a person reading one document and a person reading another could not be sure they were looking at the same company. That is part of the design.

The SEC filed a parallel civil complaint on June 5, charging Myers and his companies with violating the antifraud provisions of the Securities Act of 1933, the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, and the Investment Advisers Act of 1940. That last statute is the one that matters most for what Marlene believed she was buying. An investment adviser, under federal law, owes a fiduciary duty. The adviser is supposed to put the client's interests first. That is not a marketing promise. That is a legal duty enforceable by the Commission.

According to the SEC complaint, Myers raised approximately $4 million from approximately 28 investors across roughly five states between January 2022 and at least July 2025. As of the end of 2025, more than $3.6 million of that money was gone. About $398,000 had been returned. The rest had moved through the accounts and out of them.

The arraignment is scheduled for Friday, June 12, at 10:00 a.m. in federal court in Chicago, before U.S. District Judge Edmond E. Chang. Myers is presumed innocent. An indictment is not a conviction.

II.

Here is what the pitch looked like.

Myers told investors he had Wall Street investment-banking experience. He told them he had a personal trading record of his own success. He told them his fund was producing annual returns of between sixteen and fifty-four percent and outperforming the S&P 500. Sixteen on the low end. Fifty-four on the high end.

Read those numbers slowly.

The S&P 500, in a strong year, returns somewhere in the low twenties. A fund that consistently beats it by ten or twenty points is not a fund. It is a story about a fund. Marlene did not know that. She had spent her career taking blood pressure readings and writing field-trip permission slips. The market was a place she had been told to trust other people about.

The statements arrived quarterly. Letterhead. Columns. A line for contributions, a line for gains, a line for ending balance. The SEC alleges these documents were fabricated. The numbers on them did not reflect actual trading. They reflected what Myers wanted the investors to believe.

To hold the illusion together, Myers needed to keep the underlying math from surfacing. So, according to the complaint, he did not issue the tax forms his investors should have received. A K-1 or a 1099 from the fund would have created a paper trail that an accountant could check against the statement. Instead, the complaint alleges, Myers claimed the fund's trading losses on his own personal tax returns. The investors got their statements. The IRS got his return. The two documents did not have to agree because they were never going to be in the same room.

That is the machine. Not the trades. The statement.

III.

Inside the fund, the SEC alleges, Myers misappropriated at least $1.8 million. He moved fund assets into his personal accounts. He used some of it for trading that did not work. He used some of it for personal expenses. The complaint does not allow me to tell you what he bought. It tells me the money left.

To make the fund look bigger than it was, the complaint alleges, Myers inflated the net asset value. He included assets the fund did not own. His father-in-law's home. His father-in-law's retirement accounts. And, in a line that I had to read twice, his own hypothetical future income.

Picture that on a balance sheet. The asset column has cash. The asset column has securities. The asset column has a house belonging to a relative who did not know it had been counted. The asset column has money the manager has not earned yet but believes he will.

That is not accounting. That is wishing in a spreadsheet.

When earlier investors asked for their money back, Myers paid them. Not with returns. With the contributions of newer investors. That is the definition of a Ponzi scheme. New money walks in the front door, old money walks out the back, and the spread between them looks, on paper, like performance.

Marlene's quarterly statement was the proof that the performance existed. It was also the thing covering up the fact that it did not.

IV.

The investors who asked to withdraw, the complaint alleges, got excuses. A delay. A pending trade. A market condition. None of the excuses, the SEC says, disclosed that the money had been misused or lost.

That is the moment the fraud became visible to the people inside it, one at a time. The first withdrawal request that did not go through. The second one. The investor who called a friend in the fund and learned the friend had been told a different excuse.

Marlene did not request a withdrawal in 2024. She was not planning to touch the money until she turned seventy and had to. So she did not see the excuses. She saw only the statements. She filed them in the green folder. She told her sister at Christmas that the fund had had a good year.

The case prosecutors have brought is a federal one. U.S. Attorney Andrew S. Boutros and Assistant U.S. Attorney Jared Hasten are handling it for the Northern District of Illinois. The FBI's Chicago Field Office, under Special Agent-in-Charge Douglas S. DePodesta, conducted the investigation. The SEC assisted.

That coordination is what these cases require. The criminal indictment can put a person in prison. The civil complaint can freeze assets and disgorge profits and bar a person from the industry. Neither, by itself, gets the money back. Together, sometimes, they recover something.

The SEC's own numbers tell you what to expect. Of approximately $4 million raised, more than $3.6 million is gone. There is no balance sitting in an account waiting to be returned. There are recoveries to be litigated and assets to be traced and, eventually, a distribution to victims that will be a fraction of what they put in.

V.

The pattern is older than the names on the door.

In March, in this same federal district, a man named Ralph Rogers III was sentenced to six and a half years and ordered to pay $238,044.62 in restitution for a Ponzi-type scheme involving business opportunities that did not exist. In April, Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul issued an investor alert about fraudulent schemes proliferating on social media. The Sterling Capital indictment is not an outlier. It is the next entry.

What these cases share is not the asset class. Rogers' fund and Myers' fund traded in different fictions. What they share is the document. A statement. A pitch deck. A spreadsheet. A piece of paper that says the money is here when the money is not here. The asset class changes. The paper does not.

For a retail investor, the defense is not sophistication. Marlene was not unsophisticated. She had read the materials her brother-in-law showed her. She had asked questions. She had requested a statement before she wired the money. The defense is the question that no one wants to ask of a person who is being generous with their time and confident with their numbers.

Where is the custodian. Who holds the assets. What independent third party can confirm, without going through the adviser, that the account exists and contains what the statement says it contains.

Myers' fund, the SEC alleges, did not have that independent confirmation in any form an investor could check. The statements came from him. The tax treatment came from him. The excuses, when they came, came from him.

VI.

Marlene found out the way the others found out. Not from a phone call from Myers. From a letter, and then a news story, and then a phone call from her brother-in-law, who was crying.

The folder is still on the kitchen desk. The statements are still inside it. The numbers on them are still the numbers Myers typed.

He will be arraigned on Friday. He will plead. The case will move through the federal docket on its own schedule, which is not Marlene's schedule, and not the schedule of any of the other twenty-seven people who believed what was on the paper.

The fund promised sixteen percent on the low end. It produced, for most of them, a piece of paper.

That was the product.