On September 3, 2026, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Utah announced that a federal judge in the District of Utah had sentenced Matthew Shane Perkins, 47, of Washington City, to 180 months in federal prison for wire fraud. Prosecutors said Perkins spent more than two years posing as a “brilliant” stock trader who almost never had a losing day, a story he used to pull at least $89 million from roughly 200 investors between August 2023 and November 2025. The court also ordered him to pay $77,683,091.96 in restitution. Many of the victims, prosecutors said, were everyday Americans who lost their life savings while Perkins spent investor money on a private plane, a cabin, luxury vehicles and an $80,000 hunting trip.
Forged Oak LLC and the “Savant Trader” Pitch
Court filings describe how Perkins ran the scheme through a company called Forged Oak LLC, presenting himself as an elite trader who consistently beat the market. He struck a business arrangement with the principal of a separate company, RentDue Capital LLC, which recruited investors into three funds through social media posts, the company’s website and in-person meetings. When RentDue Capital collected money from those investors, its principal forwarded the cash to Perkins to day trade on the funds’ behalf.
Perkins then supplied RentDue Capital with falsified daily trading records and altered brokerage statements designed to make the funds look larger and steadier than they were, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office’s account of the case. In early November 2025, prosecutors said, he handed RentDue Capital an altered brokerage statement claiming the funds held more than $133 million. At the time, the real balance was less than $13 million.
Free retirement updates: Social Security and Medicare change every year, and nobody sends you a memo. Our free Retirement Shield newsletter breaks down what changed and what to do. Get it free in your inbox.
A $77.68 Million Restitution Order That May Never Be Fully Collected
Along with the prison term, Judge Ann Marie McIff Allen sentenced Perkins to three years of supervised release and ordered him to pay $77,683,091.96 in restitution to the investors he defrauded. That figure represents the outstanding victim loss prosecutors calculated after tracing where the $89 million actually went: some of it lost in day trading, the rest misappropriated for personal spending, including a down payment on a home, a cabin, an airplane, luxury vehicles and the British Columbia hunting trip.
A restitution order of that size does not guarantee investors will see their money again. Much of what Perkins took was spent on depreciating assets and travel rather than parked in an account that could later be seized and redistributed, so how much of the $77.68 million victims ultimately recover will depend on separate collection and asset-recovery proceedings that play out over years, not on the sentencing itself.
How the Pipeline Reached More Than 200 Retirement-Age Savers
The structure prosecutors described is what made the scheme scale past a handful of victims: RentDue Capital, not Perkins directly, did the recruiting, reaching investors through social media, a company website and face-to-face meetings before routing their money to Perkins to trade across three separate funds. That arrangement let Perkins stay a step removed from the people whose money he was losing, while RentDue Capital’s outreach kept new investors and new deposits coming in even as the underlying funds ran dry between August 2023 and November 2025.
“Perkins’s elaborate scheme left a slew of victims in his wake,” U.S. Attorney Melissa Holyoak for the District of Utah said in the release announcing the sentence. “Many of the over 200 victims were everyday Americans who lost their lifesavings, all to fund Perkins’ extravagant lifestyle including his private plane, cabin, and luxury cars.” For retirees and near-retirees, a loss of that size is rarely recoverable through future earnings the way it might be for a younger investor still decades from drawing down savings, since there is far less working time left to rebuild a depleted nest egg.
The Paper Trail That Investigators Say Unraveled the Scheme
The case moved on a familiar arc for fraud investigators: performance that sounded too consistent to be true, brokerage statements that did not match the funds’ actual holdings, and a middleman company that kept collecting new investor money to paper over the gap. Perkins pleaded guilty on February 2, 2026, to a single count of wire fraud rather than taking the case to trial, and the sentencing followed a joint investigation by the FBI’s Salt Lake City Field Office and St. George Resident Agency, IRS Criminal Investigation (IRS-CI), and the Utah Division of Securities. The Justice Department logged the case under its financial-fraud and securities-fraud program areas, and Assistant U.S. Attorneys Christopher Burton, Joseph Hood and Travis K. Elder of the District of Utah prosecuted it through sentencing.
“Perkins financed a lavish lifestyle by stealing from his victims, stripping away not just their savings, but the hard-earned security they spent decades building,” said FBI Salt Lake City Special Agent in Charge Robert Bohls. IRS-CI San Francisco Field Office Acting Special Agent in Charge David Lowe, whose agents worked the case alongside the FBI and Utah’s securities regulator, said the scale of the fraud and the harm it caused to hundreds of victims underscored a serious abuse of the financial system, adding that the sentence and restitution order “reflects the gravity of the defendant’s actions.”
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by The Financial Wire editorial team.
More Financial Reading
- How many CDs can you park at 1 bank? FDIC rules you must know
- Bank statements: how long to keep them and when to toss them
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.
