Woman accuses broker of losing her more than $600K, then trying to expunge record of it

CHARLOTTE — Rebecca asked not to use her full name, but she wanted to share her full story.

“I lost a lot,” she said. “Anywhere between $6- and $700,000.”

Rebecca says her broker: Kevin Lawrence Kelly. “It’s devastating. I mean, it is like, you sit there and you’re like, how could that happen? That’s an awful lot of money. And then I find out it’s not just me,” she said.

Anyone researching a broker can check them out on a federal database: BrokerCheck by the agency, FINRA. You can see complaints and what happened with them. In Kelly’s case: multiple six-figure settlements.

“The settlements that they paid were hundreds of thousands of dollars. So these are not frivolous complaints that we’re talking about,” Rebecca’s attorney, Jason Doss, said.

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But brokers can try to delete those records. “[It’s like] it never happened. They’re the best [broker] in the world,” Rebecca said. “I’m like, oh my gosh, not only are they doing this to me and to other people, they want to erase it.”

Kelly filed an expungement request, asking FINRA to make it look like half a dozen of those cases involving him never took place. “The result would be that the complaint would be erased and no one would know about it,” Doss said.

Kelly says a case where the brokerage paid a $284,000 settlement was “patently false.” Another: the brokerage settled for $625,000. But Kelly now says the accusations will be shown to be “false, clearly erroneous or factually impossible.”

Doss says he filed an official dispute with FINRA to prevent Kelly from being able to delete parts of his record. He says Kelly went ahead and dropped Rebecca’s case from that claim. Doss says the rest of Kelly’s expungement request is on hold for now, that they’re waiting for another legal step to wrap up first.

Channel 9’s sister station in Atlanta reached out to Kelly and the company he’s with. Neither responded in time for this report.

Action 9 attorney Jason Stoogenke’s advice: