A brokerage statement is supposed to be one of the simplest pieces of proof in finance: a document, from an institution with no stake in the outcome, showing exactly what sits inside an account on a given day. Prosecutors in Utah say that in early November 2025, a Washington County fund manager handed one across the table to the firm distributing his trades to investors, and that the number on it did not exist. The statement represented that more than $133 million sat inside three trading funds. Court records show the real balance, at that moment, was less than $13 million.
The Number That Was Never There
Matthew Shane Perkins, 47, of Washington City, operated an entity called Forged Oak LLC and presented himself to the market as a day trader with a long, consistent run of winning trades. According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Utah, Perkins struck a business arrangement with the principal of RentDue Capital LLC, a firm that recruited investors into three separate funds through social media, its own website and in-person meetings. Whenever RentDue Capital brought in new investor money, its principal forwarded the funds to Perkins to trade on the funds’ behalf.
That arrangement ran from August 2023 through November 2025. For most of it, RentDue Capital’s only window into how the money was performing was whatever Perkins chose to report directly, not an independent custodian and not a third-party administrator, but the trader himself. Prosecutors say Perkins built two layers of fabrication on top of that arrangement: records that falsified the funds’ daily trading results, and, separately, account statements that were altered outright. The altered statement prosecutors cite by name is dated to early November 2025, the one claiming a $133 million balance against a real sum of less than $13 million, a gap of roughly $120 million between what RentDue Capital was told and what remained.
Neither figure was disclosed to the roughly 200 people who had put money into RentDue Capital’s funds. They continued to see returns reported to them that were built on Perkins’s own paperwork, with no outside party checking the number against what a real custodian actually held.
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What a Brokerage Statement Is Supposed to Prove
A legitimate brokerage or custodial statement is not produced by the person managing the money. It comes from a separate, regulated institution that holds the assets and reports on them independently of whatever a fund manager wants investors to believe. The Securities and Exchange Commission’s investor-education arm lists a breakdown in that separation among the recurring warning signs behind failed investment schemes, noting that “account statement errors may be a sign that funds are not being invested as promised,” alongside patterns such as unusually smooth “overly consistent returns” and reliance on “unregistered investments.”
In the Perkins case, the statement RentDue Capital relied on skipped that separation entirely. It came from Perkins, the same person whose trading it was supposed to verify, rather than from a custodian with no financial stake in what the number said. A real custodial statement would have shown RentDue Capital the account balance falling toward $13 million as it happened; instead, the fund’s principal was shown a document manufactured to hide exactly that.
The Registration and Custody Checks the Statement Bypassed
Regulators maintain a public paper trail built for exactly this kind of check. The SEC’s Investor.gov service operates the Investment Adviser Public Disclosure database, which lets anyone look up whether an investment professional or firm is registered with the SEC, a state securities regulator or the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, along with any disciplinary history on file; broker-dealers can be checked the same way through FINRA’s BrokerCheck. Neither tool depends on paperwork supplied by the person raising the money, because both draw on filings made directly to the regulator.
An independently verified account statement is supposed to work on the same principle: a custodian’s own portal or mailed statement reflects only what that custodian actually holds, regardless of what the trader separately reports. RentDue Capital’s arrangement with Perkins ran the opposite way: both the performance updates and the account statement came from the same person managing the trades, with no outside reporting layer positioned to catch the divergence before it reached nine figures.
Two Hundred Investors and One Restitution Order
Roughly 200 investors put money into RentDue Capital’s three funds over more than two years, and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Utah says the total raised topped $89 million against an outstanding loss of more than $77 million by the time the scheme collapsed. Investigators say Perkins used investor money for a down payment on a home and to buy a cabin, luxury vehicles and an airplane, on top of tens of millions of dollars lost in the day trading he had told investors was consistently profitable.
Perkins was sentenced September 3, 2026, to 180 months in federal prison and ordered to pay $77,683,091.96 in restitution, a figure that traces directly back to the space between what the altered brokerage statement claimed in November 2025 and what RentDue Capital’s investors actually had left.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by The Financial Wire editorial team.
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Warren Cohen is a finance writer based in Phoenix, Arizona, covering personal finance topics including credit, banking, and beginner investing. He earned his degree in business administration from Arizona State University and began his career working in consumer finance, where he gained direct experience with lending and credit systems. He now writes for personal finance websites and fintech platforms, focusing on clear, practical content that helps readers make informed financial decisions.
