INDIANA – A man who authorities said took advantage of his Amish heritage to recruit noviceinvestors into a fraudulent scheme has been ordered to pay $5.2 million, most of it to his clients.
Indiana resident Earl Miller’s 72 investors lost more than $4.1 million when his investments failed, according to acomplaintfrom the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2015. He had encouraged people to put theirretirementsavings into his fund, which he had no experience in managing, by advertising “double digit annual returns” and promising a fixed-rate return of 8 percent to 12 percent per year, investigators said.