SEC bars Clarice Crystal Saw over alleged $2.4 million theft from elderly client

The SEC barred New York advisor Clarice Crystal Saw, 60, last month over an alleged $2.4 million theft from an elderly client. The method laid out in the complaint is the one that leaves a trail: a power of attorney obtained by deception, falsified internal records at the broker-dealer, a securities portfolio liquidated without authorization, and the client's holdings moved into bank and brokerage accounts in the advisor's own name.

Saw, a Pleasantville, N.Y., resident, was registered with Cetera Investment Services in Flushing from September 2021 to June 2022, according to her BrokerCheck profile, and the firm, one of the broker-dealers in the Cetera Financial network, drew no action in the coverage. The SEC's 2023 complaint alleged a scheme running from roughly December 2021 through March 2022, inside that single registration, and BrokerCheck says about $100,000 of the money paid car and mortgage bills, with thousands more in cash withdrawals, and that she bought securities in her own brokerage accounts with some of the remainder. She settled the SEC's charges on September 21, and the SEC barred her last month; her profile lists eleven firms across a career that ran from 1996 through 2023.

The complaint is dated 2023, the settlement and the bar landed last month, and the alleged conduct ended in March 2022, so the case took more than three years to close. Diligence on a hire or a book purchase happens on one date; the ending of an open regulatory matter can still be years off from it.

A 2023 AARP study puts annual losses to senior financial exploitation at $28.3 billion, with friends, family members and caregivers responsible for 72% of it, or $20.8 billion, and strangers accounting for the remaining $8 billion, only $7.8 billion of which is reported to authorities. Advisor fraud is a narrow slice of that total, and the cases that reach an enforcement docket tend to be the ones with a falsified record or an unauthorized liquidation behind them.

Nothing in the alleged scheme turned on a product, a fee schedule or a market call. It ran through a power of attorney, a liquidation and a transfer into accounts the advisor controlled—events that a broker-dealer's own records are supposed to surface, and the disclosure says those records were falsified. The controls that matter here are operational: who accepts a power of attorney, who releases a disbursement, and who can show later why the money moved. Senior-client policy tends to be written as a suitability question, and the failure mode in this case belonged to operations.