A former associate with MML Investors Services pleaded guilty this week to a scheme defrauding at least 60 investors of more than $3.8 million, according to the Justice Department.

Trevor Uhls’ plea in Missouri federal court to wire fraud and money laundering comes as several victims prepare for FINRA arbitration proceedings against MML (MassMutual’s advisor subsidiary), with their attorney claiming the firm failed to spot red flags at one of its branch offices.

According to court documents, Uhls was based in Lee’s Summit, Mo. and ran a scheme starting in September 2024 to solicit investors’ funds for “fake short-term, crowdfunded, real estate deals purportedly secured by promissory notes with local construction companies.”

Uhls claimed he was pooling capital from investors as loans to real estate development companies needing funds to buy land or renovate properties, and guaranteed that investors could get their principal back after 30 to 90 days at 10% to 15% interest, or keep the money invested and receive monthly interest payments.

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In one case, Uhls texted an investor claiming they’d earn 8.5% interest by pooling his funds with others to invest in storage units. But this was part of the scheme, with Uhls lying to solicit money to keep it going (there was no evidence he ever invested the money in storage units).

According to the DOJ, the borrower entity on many of the promissory notes was a Kansas City-based generational contracting services company, and the business’s co-owner was related to Uhls by marriage (though the owners were unaware of the notes).

The DOJ traced the funds and found he used most of them on sports betting, cryptocurrency exchange transactions, jewelry purchases and credit card payments totaling over $880,000. Between September 2024 and December 2025, Uhls gambled over $652,000 on sports bets and paid over $23,000 for chartered jet flights, according to the DOJ.

According to a FINRA settlement barring Uhls from the industry, Uhls was never registered with the firm and was instead referred to as a “former associated person.” MML filed to have him registered in 2023, but in January 2026, before FINRA could approve Uhls’ paperwork, MML said it ended Uhls’ contract “due to inaccurate statements provided to the firm concerning a complaint alleging an unauthorized sale of promissory notes.”

In a statement, an MML spokesperson said the firm doesn’t typically comment on pending litigation, but noted “that the promissory notes were offered for sale by Uhls personally and neither MassMutual nor MMLIS reviewed, approved or was a party to any of them,” and affirmed that Uhls’ contract ended when the activity was reported to the company.

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Florida-based attorney Chase Carlson is representing 13 investors in a FINRA arbitration proceeding against MML, alleging that the firm failed to supervise one of its branch offices properly and to detect Uhls’ scheme.

According to Carlson, several of the victims were acquainted with each other before the scheme, and many were relatively young, in their 20s and 30s (Carlson said Uhls was also in his late 20s at the time of the fraud).

“In your average scheme, it’s people who spent decades accumulating wealth and had some money to invest,” Carlson said. “This group is a bit younger, and they found some success early in life, started investing, and unfortunately, this is what they got.”

Carlson said they filed the arbitration in August and should be notified about the arbitrators selected next week, with a trial likely sometime next year. He advised other firms to try to learn from MML’s alleged mistakes.

“A lot of these frauds run the same playbook,” he said. “It’s often promissory notes at high interest rates, so firms should have systems to monitor email and DocuSign when an employee is sending out promissory notes to clients.”

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According to the DOJ, Uhls faces up to 20 years in prison for the wire fraud charges and 10 years for money laundering, as well as monetary penalties of up to $250,000.