Peaches Stergo (Photo via mugshot)
Peaches Stergo swindled an 87-year old Holocaust survivor out of his $2.8 million life savings over the span of four years and on Thursday, a judge in Manhattan sentenced the 36-year-old woman to roughly the same amount of time in prison.
It was a heartless charade by Stergo that carried on for years as she bled an elderly New York man dry, proposing scam after scam in order to drain his bank accounts. After meeting him on an online dating app, Stergo told her victim — who has not been publicly identified in court documents — that she was the recipient of a handsome reward won from a personal injury lawsuit but that she was unable to collect the funds unless she paid her attorney a fee. Her victim shelled out a loan to cover the cost, but Stergo never repaid him. Not then, or ever.
From 2017 through 2021, Stergo strung the elderly man along and obtained “loans” from him on a near-monthly basis. Over the course of her fraud, she received 62 checks totaling more than $2.8 million.
At sentencing, prosecutors explained how Stergo went to great lengths to manipulate the victim. To secure access to his bank account, she concocted phony emails, impersonated bank employees and drafted bogus letters purportedly issued from the victim’s bank, TD Bank. She did much of the same with fake invoices for a non-existent jewelry company, and as the victim’s bank began to question the huge sums of money flowing out of the account, Stergo — knowing her mark was a longtime jewelry broker — mocked up bills from “P&S Jewelry Design” to legitimize the withdrawals as payments for business services rendered.
Ahead of sentencing, prosecutors urged the court to consider the trauma and pain Stergo inflicted on the victim, who was already in cognitive decline by the time the two met. In a sentencing proposal, prosecutors described how the victim grew increasingly panicked as his life savings slipped away; ashamed, he was forced to turn to family, including his own children, and friends for help.
“The victim was in his 80s when he met the defendant. He suffers from cognitive decline among other health issues. He is frail. In turning to a dating website, the victim was searching for something so fundamental — companionship and love. And the defendant exploited that vulnerability,” U.S. Attorney Damian Williams and Assistant U.S. Attorney Adam Sowlati wrote in a July 20 sentencing proposal.
Prosecutors said Stergo not only scammed the Holocaust survivor of his life savings, but mocked him privately to John Paul Miller, described in the filing as Stergo’s “real significant other,” when the victim told her he loved her.
“She thought it was hilarious that she was destroying his life for her own benefit,” Williams wrote.
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When Stergo told Miller she was concerned that she hadn’t received a wire transfer from the victim, Miller offered to drive her to New York, presumably to convince her target to make additional payments. Stergo had asked Miller to “pray” for the victim to transfer the money — and Miller’s response when the deposit finally came through suggests that he did just that.
“Thank you King Jesus,” he told Stergo, according to prosecutors.
When the victim was nearly tapped out, Stergo fumed in private messages to Miller over how there was “nothing left to pawn.”
“I am just aggravated hurt frustrated [sic] that I haven’t made money […] I don’t want you to work like you are it’s too hard,” Stergo wrote, court records show.
In a letter submitted to the court before the judge sentenced Stergo to 51 months in prison, the victim expressed his devastation directly.
“As a Holocaust survivor, I have endured unspeakable pain and loss in my life, but never did I imagine that I would be subjected to such heartless betrayal in my old age. At the age of six, I lost both my parents in the Holocaust, and it wasn’t until ten that I had the opportunity to sit at a school desk for the first time,” the victim wrote. “I grew up in a boarding school surrounded by the echoes of the horrors I had experienced. Determined to make a better life for myself, I moved to the United States in my early twenties. Over the next 60 years, I worked tirelessly to establish a successful business, family and home in New York. I am now 88 year old and the last thing I expected was to finish my days in the same manner I started them — penniless and betrayed.”
According to a 2022 report by the AARP, on average, senior citizens and older adults lost roughly $120,000 a year to financial fraud, and for older adults suffering from cognitive issues, the vulnerability is even greater. The FBI reported in June that adults over 60 reported total losses of $3.1 billion.
Stergo, who pleaded guilty to a single count of wire fraud in April, was ordered to pay $2.8 million in restitution to her victim and was sentenced to 51 months, or four years and three months, in prison. She must forfeit a home she bought with the stolen funds as well as luxury goods like Rolex watches and other fine jewelry.
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