Former financial adviser sentenced to six years’ imprisonment for dishonest conduct (ASIC, 2020)

Judgment entered

✓ Checked against the primary document on October 2, 2026. The library's summary, tags and figures for this record were compared with the regulator's own document by an AI model (Claude) following written instructions, with sampled and disputed records read a second time. No lawyer has reviewed them. A checked record can still contain errors, and checked does not mean endorsed. See how we check records or report a correction.

Report an error in this record (asic-20-177mr-ponzi-schemes-2020) by email

In August 2020 ASIC announced that former financial adviser Graeme Miller had been sentenced to six years' imprisonment, with parole eligibility after four, for misappropriating $1.865 million from ten clients; the judge called his conduct a Ponzi scheme.

The record

What was ordered

Civil penalty

—

Disgorgement

—

Prejudgment interest

—

Total relief

—

Alleged gain

—

A dash means the release did not state a figure we could extract, not that the figure is zero. Penalty and disgorgement are stored separately so aggregates across the library do not double-count the same dollars.

What is alleged to have happened

Miller, a director of CFS Private Wealth, pleaded guilty in April 2020 to six counts of dishonest conduct under section 1041G of the Corporations Act. Between 2013 and 2017 he steered clients' money to CFS Corporation, which he also directed, instead of investing it: $987,000 went to accounts and cards of his family, $318,500 paid dividends or returns to other clients, $135,000 covered other costs and $27,000 was withdrawn in cash or sent overseas. The court ordered reparation of about $1.777 million. In January 2019 the Federal Court had already banned him from financial services for 25 years.

The record showed the outcome as unknown with no sentence.

This library tags the matter as ponzi schemes because ASIC or the sentencing court describes new investors' money being used to pay earlier investors. The tagging is ours, not the regulator's: agencies charge statutory provisions, not technique names.

What technique is this, and how does it work?

This action is tagged with one technique in our taxonomy. The tagging is ours: regulators charge statutory provisions, not technique names, so the mapping is an editorial judgement described in our editorial policy.

• Ponzi schemes — see how it works, what statute it engages, and every other action tagged the same way.

Timeline

1. 2020-08-04 ASIC media release

Primary documents

Everything on this page derives from the documents below. Where our summary and the primary document disagree, the primary document is right.

• ASIC media release

The linked release is published by the issuing regulator under its own terms. Our summary and narrative above are our own writing.

Related actions

Other actions in the library sharing at least one technique tag with this one.

Record added September 10, 2026. submit a correction.