A onetime Jacksonville investment adviser who financial regulators couldn’t find for almost two years has faced a judge to admit fraud accusations about cheating customers and a pandemic-era loan program.
Jared Dean Eakes, 34, pleaded guilty Sept. 25 to federal wire fraud and bank fraud charges carrying the potential for a prison sentence as long as 50 years and a seven-figure fine.
“You’re comfortable with your plea?” U.S. Magistrate Judge Patricia Barksdale asked before saying she’d recommend the courts accept his admission of two of the eight counts in a July 2024 indictment.
Pieces of the claims Eakes admitted had been leveled as early as September 2022, when the Securities and Exchange Commission sued, arguing he had misappropriated $2.6 million from customers at a company he owned, GraySail Advisers, LLC.
Eakes had grown his business by buying other investment advice companies and moving those firms’ customers (and their money) to GraySail, prosecutors wrote in the July 2024 indictment.
Eakes controlled customer accounts and emailed faked documents indicating customer money was being invested in a Jacksonville-based firm, Small World Capital LLC, according to the indictment, which said a “scheme to defraud” was hatched around 2019 or 2020.
In fact, Small World “never performed any substantive business,” prosecutors’ indictment said, adding later that “Small World was a shell company and the funds were subsequently transferred to Eakes for his benefit.”
Investor money ended up being moved to a personal fund Eakes had, the indictment said, with some used to pay bills and some sent to a casino company in Las Vegas.
Eakes’ plea only admitted one wire fraud count, involving a $602,500 movement of money out of Small World in 2019, but other transactions described in the indictment could work against him at his sentencing, which hasn’t been scheduled.
The other count Eakes pleaded to involved a bogus 2020 application for a $960,625 loan under the Paycheck Protection Program, the system the federal government created during the COVID pandemic to advance forgivable money to businesses whose revenue vanished when the pandemic disrupted huge parts of the economy.
People across Jacksonville, and the country, have been prosecuted for that fraud.
The SEC’s lawsuit is also still unresolved, with the commission having argued in a 2023 update of its lawsuit that Eakes was “actively concealing his whereabouts.” Eakes was finally arrested after a traffic stop in May 2024, weeks after a warrant was issued in his criminal case. The lawsuit was stopped in January because of a now-settled legal question in the criminal case about whether Eakes was mentally competent, and SEC lawyers reported in April that they expected the civil case to resume since that question had been resolved.
This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Ex-investment adviser who SEC chased for $2.6M civil suit pleads to fraud in Jacksonville
Reporting by Steve Patterson, Jacksonville Florida Times-Union / Florida Times-Union
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