$4.5m fraud sees former Victorian adviser jailed

Anthony Del Vecchio pleaded guilty to 24 charges of obtaining financial advantage by deception in March, resulting in the County Court of Victoria handing down a sentence on Wednesday of seven years and six months’ imprisonment with a non-parole period of four years.

He was employed as an adviser at Freedom Finance Australia from November 2016 until October 2023 when his employment was terminated.

Between February 2020 and December 2023, he used his position as a financial adviser to convince members of family, friends and clients to transfer money to him under the pretext of investing their funds in various investments, such as term deposits, bonds and shares.

In some cases, he provided documents using the Freedom Finance letterhead to purport the terms of their investment although no financial product was ever purchased.

This came to a total of $4.48 million from the victims which was deposited into his Commonwealth Bank of Australia accounts.

Following his arrest in February 2024, Del Vecchio said he was “in too deep and the stress was incomprehensible”, and that he was “trying to win enough money to pay everyone back”.

He had transactions with 52 different betting companies and lost over $1 million with one specific company, MintBet.

In sentencing on 16 April at the County Court of Victoria, Judge Gabriele Cannon sentenced him to seven years and six months’ imprisonment with a non-parole period of four years.

“You breached the trust that the victims placed in you as a financial adviser and in many instances, as a friend and/or family member, callously taking advantage of such relationships to commit the offences.

“The significant breach of trust is an aggravating feature of your offending. Further, the offending was planned and had a level of sophistication to it in a number of instances, especially where you used false documents and manufactured investment schemes and the like in order to defraud the victims.

“Further, in a number of instances, the offending went beyond opportunistic, as you actively sought out your victims, knowing full well they could ill afford to part with such significant sums of money, which, in a number of cases, were their life savings.”

If not for his guilty plea, he would have been sentenced to nine years and six months with a non-parole period of six years and six months.