Albert Cohen, a professor of sociology who spent 25 years teaching courses on criminal behavior, told a Boston judge at a sentencing hearing last week that he can still make ends meet, despite being ripped off by a former financial adviser. According to The Boston Globe, John Baldo spent most of the $1.6 million he stole from the 89-year-old on Las Vegas strippers. The losers, the retired professor told the Globe, are his younger relatives and several institutions, including Harvard and the American Civil Liberties Union. “What I was led to do was tear up [my] will as null and void,” Cohen told the Globe, referring to the impact the theft had on his estate. “The money was simply not there.” Baldo was sentenced to seven years in prison.

“This can be a lesson for us all,” wrote Chuck Jaffee in MarketWatch last year, when Baldo was first arrested in Vegas. Jaffe pointed out that basic precautions against fraudsters would have quickly revealed Baldo’s criminal intentions., “Had the victims called their state securities administrator, they would have found that Baldo was not registered as any type of adviser. Had they contacted the national financial organizations, they would have learned Baldo never was a certified financial planner.” Instead, the victims made the mistake of taking the con man’s “excessive show of wealth as a sign of what might be coming to them someday.”