Ex-Ameriprise Advisor Awaits Sentencing in $1.2M Fraud Case

What You Need to Know

The company discharged the financial professional in 2022 and has refunded clients funds they lost.
Dusty Sternadel had worked previously for Morgan Stanley and Edward Jones.
Potential penalties include up to 20 years in prison and up to three years supervised release,

A former Ameriprise Financial advisor in Wichita Falls, Texas, is scheduled for sentencing later this month after pleading guilty to a fraud scheme in which she took more than $1.2 million from clients.

Dusty Sternadel pleaded guilty to wire fraud in January in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas and is scheduled to be sentenced at the federal courthouse in Fort Worth on April 26. She signed a plea agreement in December.

A judge this week denied her attorney’s request to postpone sentencing to give the former advisor more time to obtain the nearly $122,000 needed to protect her family home from forfeiture, according to court records.

From roughly September 2019 to July 2022, “Sternadel engaged in a scheme to defraud Ameriprise clients by tricking them into sending her funds or checks under false representations and pretenses and then depositing them in her own accounts at financial institutions for her personal use,” according to details that government and defense attorneys reported in connection with the plea agreement.

In one instance, for example, Sternadel initiated a wire transfer from a client’s Ameriprise account to their bank account, then told the client that the investment firm had mistakenly transferred someone else’s money.

Sternadel instructed the client to write a check for the purported amount and bring it to her, according to a “factual resume” associated with the plea. “On the basis of Sternadel’s misrepresentation, Victim 1 wrote a check for $26,916 and gave it to Sternadel, who deposited it into her own (business) bank account at a financial institution. She then used these funds for personal expenses.

“Sternadel admits that she acted with the specific intent to defraud, that is, to deceive and cheat a person out of money or property,” according to the court document, which cites 10 other victims.