While one investor’s online account showed a balance of $981,000, the actual brokerage account behind that number held less than $2,000 combined — and Carole A. Liston knew it.

The Pitch: “I’ve Never Lost Anyone’s Money”

From at least August 2020 through July 2024, Carole A. Liston ran what federal regulators now describe as a textbook Ponzi scheme out of Palm Beach Gardens, Florida. She built two companies: Stock Purse Trading LLC and Liston Associates, Inc. Together, they formed the infrastructure of a fraud that reached more than 200 investors spread across the United States.

Liston’s pitch was simple and brutally effective. She claimed to have developed a proprietary trading algorithm for short selling stocks, told investors her strategy “goes against traditional norms,” and promised monthly returns of 5% to 20%. She told at least one investor she could turn a $400,000 investment into $1 million within a year. She promised others she could double their money in 30 to 60 days.

She found her victims through friends, family, word-of-mouth referrals, real estate networks, multi-level marketing seminars, and church communities. She pitched in person and over the phone. She even built a polished website at Stockpursetrading.com where investors could log in and see their account balances growing in real time.

Three Funds, One Lie

Liston offered investors three vehicles: the “Growth Fund,” a long-term account allowing regular withdrawals; the “Income Fund,” a shorter-term pooled investment paying monthly returns; and the “Family Fund,” which promised to double your money within six months. The Growth Fund and Income Fund both advertised monthly returns between 5% and 15%. Investors submitted an online form, agreed to Terms and Conditions, and wired their money directly to Liston’s accounts.

Early on, Liston directed investors to wire funds to her personal bank account. According to the SEC complaint, she told at least one investor to describe the wire as a “loan” so it would not be flagged by the bank. That instruction alone tells you everything you need to know about what she thought she was doing.

Investments ranged from a few thousand dollars to hundreds of thousands. Investor 2 wired her $450,000 (roughly the median price of a home in the United States) based solely on Liston’s claim that she could turn it into $1 million within a year. Investor 3 put in over $250,000 (more than five years of median American household income) after Liston personally assured him his money was “safe” and returns were “guaranteed.”

The Machine: How a Ponzi Actually Runs

Of the $5.7 million ($5,700,000 — equivalent to the combined annual wages of roughly 95 median-income American workers) Liston collected, the SEC says she deposited less than $1.7 million into an actual brokerage account for trading. She lost most of that. SPT’s brokerage records show net trading losses of more than $230,000 over the entire relevant period. The algorithm was fiction. The expertise was fiction. The track record was fiction.

To keep the machine running, Liston routed at least $3.9 million (enough to send 130 students to a public university for four years) of incoming investor money straight to older investors as fake “returns.” This is the defining mechanism of a Ponzi: you are not earning profits, you are spending someone else’s principal and pretending it is your own genius at work. When the new money runs out, the whole thing collapses.

The SEC also found that Liston used investor funds to make loans to other investors and to send payments to real estate entities that had nothing to do with any legitimate trading operation. The money went everywhere except where she told investors it would go.

The Website Was a Lie Factory

Liston directed investors to her website to check their account balances. Those balances were entirely fabricated. She built and maintained a system of fake dashboards that showed soaring account values while the actual brokerage account held next to nothing. According to the SEC complaint, in December 2022 and January 2023, SPT’s brokerage account held a combined balance of less than $2,000. During that same period, one investor’s dashboard showed an account value of $981,000 on a $395,000 principal investment, a claimed gain of 148%.

Liston, as the person with “ultimate control” over SPT’s website, posted these fictitious balances for over a year. She knew the trading was failing. She posted the fake gains anyway. This is not accidental negligence; it is a calculated decision to keep people from pulling their money out while she continued recruiting new victims.

The margin trading deception adds another layer. Liston engaged in highly speculative margin trading, a strategy that can cause losses exceeding a trader’s initial investment, without ever telling investors she was doing so. SPT’s website used the word “margin” but defined it as a business efficiency metric, the kind of “operating margin” language you see in corporate earnings reports. It said nothing about leveraged trading risk or how margin calls could freeze investor funds. Investors only learned the brokerage account was “in deficit, also known as margin” when Liston posted a notice on the website in summer 2023, after she had already failed to return their principal.

The Non-Financial Ledger: What Money Can’t Measure

There is a specific kind of betrayal built into how Carole Liston recruited her investors. She did not find them through cold calls or financial ads. She found them at church. She found them through real estate networks and multi-level marketing seminars, places where people show up because they are trying to build something better for themselves and their families. She used the social architecture of trust, community, and aspiration, and she turned it into a funnel for theft.

Think about the investor Liston approached through a three-way phone call, a person who brought their own brother into the conversation to hear Liston’s pitch. That detail matters. When you involve your family in a financial decision, you are doing so because you trust the opportunity enough to stake your reputation on it with people who love you. Investor 3 put in over $250,000 (more than five years’ worth of median household income) after Liston personally guaranteed his investment was safe and returns were certain. The SEC complaint does not say whether that brother also invested. It does not need to. The damage to that relationship, the guilt, the second-guessing, the dinner table silences — none of that appears in a disgorgement order.

The investors who watched their online dashboards climb were not passive marks. They were engaged. They were watching. They were planning. Some of them had mapped out what they would do with a 148% return on their principal. Maybe it was paying off a mortgage. Maybe it was a child’s college fund. Maybe it was early retirement after decades of wage work. Liston knew exactly what she was doing when she built those fake account pages: she was not just hiding bad news, she was actively manufacturing hope in people who had real needs, so they would stay quiet and keep recruiting their own networks.

The church pipeline is where the human cost becomes most acute. Faith communities run on trust, on the belief that the people around you share your values and would not use that bond as a weapon. When someone exploits a congregation as a recruitment network for a fraud, the damage radiates outward beyond the financial loss. People question their own judgment. They feel ashamed. They may feel that their faith was weaponized against them. The SEC complaint gives no names, no testimonies, no faces to these 200-plus people. But the geography of how Liston found them, friends, family, church, MLM networks, tells you exactly who was sitting on the other end of those wire transfers: ordinary people who were trying, through whatever means available to them, to get ahead.

Legal Receipts: Straight from the Complaint

“Liston falsely promised monthly returns ranging from 5% to 20% and claimed to double investors’ money within 30 to 60 days. Liston also claimed that she could generate profits of 350% in one year by pooling investor funds in brokerage accounts and investment ‘funds’ she managed.” SEC Amended Complaint, Paragraph 3

“In reality, Liston only used a small portion of investor funds to purchase and trade securities and, when she did, her trading produced significant losses. Liston misappropriated at least $450,000 of investor funds for her personal benefit, and used at least $3.9 million in investor funds to make Ponzi-like distributions to SPT investors.” SEC Amended Complaint, Paragraph 5

“The $981,000 purported balance for this investor was fictitious and significantly higher than the entire value of SPT’s brokerage account. SPT’s brokerage records for December 2022 and January 2023 show SPT’s account balances totaling less than $2,000 combined. Despite knowing that SPT was not generating profits but, instead, experiencing significant trading losses, Liston, the person with ultimate control over SPT’s website, continued to post fictitious account balances for investor account summaries for over a year, lulling investors into believing that Defendants were generating promised returns.” SEC Amended Complaint, Paragraph 33

“Additionally, Liston misappropriated more than $450,000 in payments for personal items including real estate purchases, car purchases, hotels, clothing and luxury gifts, credit cards, and a cruise vacation with friends.” SEC Amended Complaint, Paragraph 43

“In at least one instance, Liston told an investor to describe the wire as a ‘loan’ so the wire would not be flagged by the bank.” SEC Amended Complaint, Paragraph 20

“SPT investors were notified of Defendants’ use of margin for the first time in the summer of 2023, after Defendants failed to return to investors their principal investments, when Defendants posted a notice on SPT’s website stating that the ‘brokerage account is in a deficit also known as margin.'” SEC Amended Complaint, Paragraph 39

Societal Impact Mapping

Economic Inequality: Who Ponzi Schemes Actually Destroy

Liston raised her $5.7 million ($5,700,000, a sum that could fund a full year of emergency housing assistance for over 1,500 families) almost entirely through social networks that skew toward working- and middle-class people: church congregations, real estate networking circles, and MLM seminar attendees. These are not the venues where ultra-wealthy accredited investors gather. These are places where people who have been told their whole lives to “invest, build wealth, make your money work for you” are genuinely trying to do exactly that.

The investment minimums were accessible by design. Liston accepted amounts ranging from “a few thousand dollars to hundreds of thousands.” A few thousand dollars is a meaningful sum for a working family, sometimes representing an entire emergency fund or a year of side-hustle savings. When that disappears into a fraud, the family does not just lose the money; it loses the psychological safety net that money represented. The data on financial trauma is clear: losing a significant portion of liquid savings causes measurable increases in anxiety, depression, and relationship stress.

The Ponzi structure specifically punishes the most trusting and the most connected. Early investors receive fake returns (paid from later investors’ principal) and sometimes recruit their own networks. When the scheme collapses, those early recipients may face clawback liability, meaning they could be forced to return money they already spent, believing it was legitimately earned. The people who got in first and referred their church friends are now potentially on the hook for funds they never knew were stolen. Liston created a system where victims can become inadvertent perpetrators, and that is not an accident; it is how Ponzi schemes sustain themselves.

The broader economic cost extends to regulatory resources. The SEC, funded by taxpayer dollars, had to investigate, file, and litigate this case. Every enforcement action against a retail-level Ponzi consumes resources that could address larger systemic frauds. Liston’s scheme is one of hundreds the SEC pursues annually, a volume that reflects the systemic vulnerability of communities that lack access to legitimate, regulated, low-cost investment options and financial education delivered by institutions they can trust.

Public Health: The Invisible Wound of Financial Trauma

The SEC complaint is a legal document; it does not track what happens to victims after the fraud is discovered. But the research on investment fraud victims is consistent and damning. Studies on Ponzi scheme victims show elevated rates of clinical depression, anxiety disorders, and post-traumatic stress. Victims often report symptoms comparable to those experienced after violent crime. The loss is compounded by shame, the feeling that they were foolish to believe someone who told them their money was “safe” and returns were “guaranteed.”

Investor 3 brought his brother on a phone call to hear Liston’s pitch. That is not a minor detail. When financial fraud intersects with family relationships, the damage to mental health operates on multiple tracks simultaneously: grief over lost money, guilt over having brought loved ones into the scheme, and the destruction of trust that makes financial decision-making feel possible again. Rebuilding after that is not a matter of weeks. Research on fraud recovery consistently shows that psychological recovery takes longer than financial recovery, if it comes at all.

The specific demographics Liston targeted, churchgoers, MLM seminar attendees, real estate networkers, are disproportionately composed of women, Black and brown Americans, and immigrant communities, precisely the groups that already face the greatest structural barriers to wealth building and who often turn to community-based financial networks because mainstream financial institutions have excluded or exploited them. For these communities, a high-profile fraud does not just harm individual victims; it erodes trust in any community-based financial opportunity, making legitimate cooperative investment harder for everyone who follows.

The “Cost of a Life” Metric

What Now?

Who Is Still Out There

The SEC complaint names Carole A. Liston, age 61, residing in Yonkers, New York, as the founder, president, director, and CEO of both Stock Purse Trading LLC and Liston Associates, Inc. Both companies were administratively dissolved in September 2024. Liston has never been registered with the SEC in any capacity. The SEC states directly: “Unless enjoined, Defendants will continue to violate the federal securities laws.”

The Regulatory Watchlist

• SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission): Filed the amended complaint on August 20, 2025. Seeking permanent injunctions, full disgorgement of ill-gotten gains with prejudgment interest, and civil monetary penalties against Liston, Stock Purse Trading LLC, and Liston Associates, Inc.
• CFPB (Consumer Financial Protection Bureau): Track for any cross-referral on the consumer fraud dimensions, particularly the targeting of vulnerable community networks.
• FINRA (Financial Industry Regulatory Authority): Verify whether any registered brokers or advisers interacted with SPT accounts or facilitated investor onboarding.
• Florida Office of Financial Regulation: Both entities were Florida corporations. State-level securities regulators may have parallel enforcement actions or victim compensation programs.
• New York State Department of Financial Services: Liston now resides in Yonkers. State-level action remains a possibility for any New York-based victims.

What You Can Do Right Now

If you or someone you know invested with Stock Purse Trading or Liston Associates, file a complaint directly with the SEC at sec.gov/tcr and contact a plaintiffs’ securities fraud attorney immediately. You may have rights to recovery as part of the disgorgement process. More broadly: share this story with your community, especially with the networks Liston exploited: church groups, real estate circles, and any MLM-adjacent communities where promises of “guaranteed returns” circulate freely. The best defense against the next Carole Liston is a community that already knows what to look for. Mutual aid means sharing information. Grassroots resistance means making it harder for the next fraudster to find a trusting room full of people who just want to build something.