Ex-LPL broker pleads guilty in $2.8 million fraud

An 11-year veteran rep with LPL Financial in Worcester, Massachusetts, last week pleaded guilty to his involvement in a long-running scheme to steal more than $2.8 million from six clients.

The broker, James K. Couture, 42, pleaded guilty to four counts of wire fraud, four counts of aggravated identity theft, one count of investment adviser fraud and one count of witness tampering, according to a statement last Thursday by the U.S. Attorney's Office for Massachusetts.

Couture, who will be sentenced in January, could not be reached Monday morning to comment. A spokesperson from LPL did not comment.

The charges have various sentences ranging from two years up to 20 years in prison.

From approximately 2009 to 2020, the period in which he was working at LPL, Couture misappropriated approximately $2.8 million from his clients by transferring funds out of clients’ accounts, investing it in fictitious mutual funds and then selling other clients’ holdings to pay investment returns, according to the Justice Department.

In June 2016, Couture liquidated one client’s variable annuities to fund withdrawals by another client, according to the U.S. Attorney's office. Similarly, in December 2019 and January 2020, Couture paid a client he had previously defrauded by selling other clients’ mutual funds.

As part of this scheme, Couture, who was barred from the securities industry by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority Inc. in 2020, forged clients’ signatures on documents or caused clients to sign documents by falsely representing that the proceeds of transactions would be used for the clients’ benefit, according to federal prosecutors. Couture also stole from clients using their own profit-sharing plans and conducting transactions in their names to disguise his fraudulent transactions.

Couture's BrokerCheck report shows four customer disputes totaling almost $3.2 million in damages have been settled.