CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- All Joyce and Phillip Barrier wanted was enough money to retire. Almost every day for more than 20 years, they'd gone to work at the small general store they owned near the Virginia line.

When they sold the store, they planned to invest the money. Then they saw an ad in the classifieds that led them to a Charlotte man named Gary Keever, who told them he was buying and selling mortgages and could guarantee them a 40 percent return.

“It looked like a very good deal,” Joyce Barrier said. “We could live off the interest. I could buy medicine, we could pay our house payments, our electric bill, telephone bill, take vacations.”

“We just thought it was the answer to some of our problems, our financial problems,” said Phillip Barrier.

The barriers bought in and gave Keever $150,000 -- almost everything they'd made from selling their store. But four months later, they knew it was a mistake when their monthly check for $5, 000 bounced.

“(It) made me feel I'd lost my investment at that point,” said Phillip Barrier.

“Some nights I don't go to sleep (when) thinking about it. I stay awake all night,” Joyce Barrier said.

Before long the Barriers realized they were the only ones. Investigators with the Secretary of State's Office were looking at Keever's investment scheme. According to their files, Keever had a long history of fraud charges and bankruptcies.

Last month, investigators arrested Keever and charged him with more than two dozen counts of fraud. He allegedly cheated investors, including his own neighbors in southwest Charlotte, out of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Neighbor Roger Wallace said Keever approached him about a deal to buy the wooded lot between their homes. Wallace said Keever was offering Wallace a chance to buy into the deal for $27,500.

“Here are some of the original contracts he'd drawn up with the fake signatures on it,” Wallace said, holding several documents.

Wallace said he didn't realize that those signatures weren't genuine until he contacted the property owners.

“They were kind enough to give me this letter confirming that they had never heard of Gary Keever and had never been in any negotiations,” Wallace said.

An Eyewitness news crew found Keever mowing his lawn and tried to ask him some questions, but he ran inside.

“You have a lot of people's money. What are you doing with it?” asked reporter Mark Becker.

While Keever may not want to talk about what's happened to the money involved in the allegations, others can't avoid it. “I need to find work for us to be OK,” said Phillip Barrier.

He is now looking for a new job to make up for a lifetime of work that was lost.

“He got up at 4 o'clock every morning, sometimes earlier in the winter if we thought bad weather was coming in, for 20 some years, and this is what you get in life,” said Joyce Barrier.

The Barriers and all of the other investors Eyewitness News spoke with are hoping to get some of their money back.

Wallace did get his money back, but he believes there may be other victims out there.

Keever has been granted a public defender. Eyewitness News tried speaking with him several times but no one would come to his front door.