The two phone calls took about 10 minutes each.
In those calls, Bruce MacMillan admits, he directed his financial adviser at R.M. Davis Inc., a prominent Portland-based wealth management firm, to liquidate three Fidelity investment accounts worth a total of $1.3 million.
The adviser asked what he planned to do with the money, noted there would be significant income tax implications and questioned whether MacMillan was taking the money to another firm, according to court papers.
“I told him I had an exciting real estate opportunity,” said MacMillan, now 80, remembering conversations that occurred in February 2022.
Soon after, MacMillan, who lived in Phippsburg at the time, transferred the cash to a bitcoin account he believed was protected by the Social Security Administration.
He realized too late that he and his wife, Linda, had been scammed out of their life savings.
Now, the state’s highest court is set to consider whether R.M. Davis was obligated to do more to protect the couple.
Bruce MacMillan has appealed earlier decisions by the Business and Consumer Court in Portland, where a judge concluded that the firm owed the couple no such protection. He hopes the seven justices of the Law Court give him a second chance at a jury trial initially sought in the June 2023 lawsuit.
The MacMillans’ experience sheds light on the limits of laws and professional guidelines that are meant to prevent older adults from being financially exploited. It also emphasizes the need for members of the finance sector and their customers to be more diligent and aware of a growing threat.
The MacMillans claimed R.M. Davis failed to spot red flags of elder fraud — something all of its employees are trained to recognize and the firm presented as a priority to its clients, according to the appeal.
R.M. Davis maintains that it cannot be held liable for the MacMillans’ losses because, it says, Bruce MacMillan lied and withheld information and there is no law that required the firm to protect the couple from third-party scammers.
“They never disclosed to RMD that they believed their Fidelity accounts had been compromised or that they planned to transfer their life savings to a cryptocurrency account, and they never sought RMD’s advice or guidance regarding their plans,” the firm said in response to the appeal. “The MacMillans intentionally misled RMD about their plans for their money when they directed RMD to liquidate their investment accounts.”
Lying is common among fraud victims who have been groomed by scammers, and dubious reasons for sudden large withdrawals are among the red flags that can signal elder financial exploitation, according to law enforcement and other experts.
The ruling
When Judge Thomas McKeon ruled in favor of R.M. Davis in October 2024, he concluded that the MacMillans had long relied on the firm for investment advice and fund management, “not to protect them from falling for a scam on their own computer.”
McKeon also found that, given the historical relationship between the firm and its clients, “it does not seem reasonable to impose on R.M. Davis a duty to delay clear instructions from a client in order to conduct some type of undefined investigation.”
Yet experts say that’s the intent of so-called “report-and-hold laws,” passed in Maine and 23 other states in recent years. They grant immunity from prosecution to trained investment advisers and broker-dealers if they suspect financial exploitation, report it to authorities and temporarily hold a transaction so it can be vetted.
Maine’s version, enacted in 2019, was expanded to include banks and credit unions in 2025. The federal Senior Safe Act of 2018, co-sponsored by U.S. Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, offers similar protections but doesn’t authorize transaction delays.
Although there is no law that requires financial advisers to root out every potential scam behind every transaction, regulators at the Maine Office of Securities hope the growing threat helps firms see it as a necessary professional obligation.
“Scams like this are a problem of global proportions now,” said Jesse Devine, Maine’s securities administrator. “It’s important to raise awareness and be cautious about any financial transaction, no matter how legitimate it may appear at first glance.”
The scam
Without his investment income, Bruce MacMillan went back to work in 2023, taking a part-time job as a greeter at L.L.Bean’s flagship store in Freeport, where he earns $16 an hour for up to 12 hours per week.
He said in a recent interview that the money augments his $2,900 monthly Social Security benefit and helps to pay down debt he and his wife accrued as a result of the scam. He tries to stay positive, but he admits his life is far from the comfortable retirement they envisioned.
Bruce and Linda MacMillan met as graduate students at Syracuse University. Both successful communications professionals, they moved to Maine in 1998. They were married for 52 years before she died last June while in memory care at OceanView in Falmouth.
Their scam began Feb. 1, 2022, when they were sitting at their home computer, working on passwords, he said. Suddenly, a graphic warning blasted across the screen, telling them they had been hacked and their finances were at risk. They called the 800 number immediately.
The scammers said they were security personnel with Microsoft and Fidelity, MacMillan recalled. They were smooth and reassuring, he said, explaining that they had just stopped $100,000 from being stolen from one of their accounts.
A man who identified himself as “Alen Watson” said they had notified federal authorities and the MacMillans needed new Social Security numbers. In the meantime, Watson said, the MacMillans had to transfer all of their money to a federally protected account via bitcoin.
AAt that point, we were in the middle of a scam trance,” MacMillan said. “He said, ‘I’ll get you through this,’ and we believed him.”
After receiving calls from MacMillan on Feb. 3 and 9, R.M. Davis “placed the trades” as instructed, selling the stocks in the couple’s investment accounts. MacMillan, in turn, used his Fidelity online account to wire the money to Coinbase, according to court papers.
The MacMillans normally were risk-averse, had never made a transaction above $20,000 and gave no previous indication they planned to alter their financial strategy, said Bruce Hepler, the couple’s lawyer.
“This was an extremely unusual request for the MacMillans, and it was entirely out of character considering their past history with R.M. Davis,” Hepler said in an emailed statement.
The red flags
The number of complaints about government impersonation scams increased 50% in recent years, from 11,554 incidents worth $240.6 million in 2022 to 17,367 incidents worth $405.6 million in 2024, according to the latest FBI data.
Among people aged 60 and up, scams involving cryptocurrency more than tripled in the same period, from 9,991 incidents worth $1 billion to 33,369 incidents worth $2.8 billion.
“The risk and scope of this problem is exploding,” said John Brautigam, executive director of Legal Services for Maine Elders, a firm that represents older Mainers at no cost.
“Report-and-hold laws are definitely making progress, but that’s still a voluntary thing,” Brautigam said. “It provides the time and space for wiser heads to prevail, but we still need to respect the rights of older people. Sometimes the best we can do is provide information.”
Red flags of elder fraud include uncharacteristic financial activity, sudden large withdrawals, unexplained account changes, altered wills or other personal documents and showing confusion, fear or secrecy about finances.
“In the list of red flags they’re supposed to look for, (the MacMillans’ case) ticked off every one,” said Hepler, their attorney.
The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority is an independent nonprofit that writes and enforces rules governing more than 3,200 member securities firms with over 630,000 stockbrokers registered with the federal Securities and Exchange Commission.
In addition to backing report-and-hold laws, FINRA also requires firms to make a “reasonable effort” to obtain the name of a so-called “trusted contact person” they can call if they suspect a customer is being scammed.
“Trusted contacts and temporary holds have played an important role in providing member firms ways to quickly respond to suspicions of financial exploitation before potentially ruinous losses occur for the customer,” a FINRA spokesperson said in an emailed statement.
In its 2025 and 2026 annual regulatory reports, FINRA encouraged its members to increase efforts to prevent elder fraud, including findings that some firms hadn’t fully complied with its rules to protect senior investors.
While R.M. Davis had a trusted contact policy, Bruce MacMillan didn’t fill out a trusted contact form and instead provided a list of contacts “in case Linda and I are incapacitated,” according to the summary judgment.
The firm’s response
R.M. Davis is registered with the SEC, as is George Carr, a principal of the firm who was the MacMillans’ financial adviser in February 2022. The firm isn’t a member of FINRA, which oversees broker-dealers but not financial advisers.
Founded in Portland in 1978, R.M. Davis was named among the top 100 financial adviser firms in the U.S. by CNBC in 2021 and 2023, and it now manages over $7 billion in assets in nearly 5,900 accounts, according to SmartAsset.com.
For the bulk of the MacMillans’ time with R.M. Davis, their financial adviser had been Peter Richardson, a former vice president of the firm who retired at the end of 2021.
At the time of the scam, Carr had been the MacMillans’ adviser for a short time, having conducted a two-hour portfolio review in December and an hour-long financial update in January, both by phone.
In response to an interview request, R.M. Davis emailed a statement saying the firm was “deeply saddened” that the MacMillans “were targeted victims of an elaborate financial fraud.”
The statement emphasized that R.M. Davis never transferred assets from the MacMillans’ Fidelity accounts to Coinbase, and the scammers never accessed or compromised the firm’s computer systems or programs and never communicated with or through the firm.
“R.M. Davis did precisely and only what the MacMillans asked us to do,” the firm stated. “They asked us to sell their stock so that they could invest in real estate, and they never informed us that their actual plan was to transfer the funds into a cryptocurrency account.”
The firm for many years has offered educational programs for clients on the risks of identity theft and cybercrimes. At the same time, the firm “is obligated to honor a legally competent client’s clear and unambiguous instructions, even if we recommend a different course of action.”
R.M. Davis didn’t respond to emailed questions on why it didn’t strive to retain the MacMillans as clients, or whether it has altered staff training on elder financial exploitation in the wake of the MacMillans’ experience.
The Law Court is expected to hear oral arguments in March.
This story was originally published by the Maine Trust for Local News. Kelley Bouchard can be reached at [email protected].
