BATON ROUGE - A jury found the Louisiana Office of Financial Institutions not civilly liable in the Stanford Trust Ponzi scheme in an 11-1 decision Friday.

The jury did say that the OFI owed a duty to the plaintiffs, but did not engage in reckless conduct.

Allen Stanford and the Stanford Trust Company operated a Ponzi scheme that bilked investors out of nearly a billion dollars; Stanford is serving a life sentence after the Securities and Exchange Commission caught on to Allen's antics and in 2009, US Marshals raided office buildings in Houston, shuttering offices across the South.

The Stanford Victims' Coalition claimed the OFI warned member banks about Stanford in 2004, but did not warn "innocent, retirement-aged IRA holders."

Lynn Gildersleeve's parents were one of the thousands of victims of the scam, and believes her parents would've been heartbroken after the ruling.

"I'm glad they're dead, because they worked all their lives and would've lost everything," Gildersleeve said.

It took 15 years for those victims to have this day in court. Some saw it as a last-ditch effort to recoup some of the millions of dollars, often their entire retirement savings, that had been stolen. News that their money was gone turned lives upside down.

A Ponzi scheme uses new investments to provide what looks like profits to earlier customers. As it snowballs, it takes more and more money to pay off the investors until the whole scam eventually collapses. The Stanford trust operation is regarded as the second-largest Ponzi scheme to ever operate in the U.S.

Darrell Glasper, another victim of the scam, believes the OFI should have warned people when they were notified years prior.
 
"As soon as these deposits went into the bank, they were immediately transferred overseas, that was a red flag right there. When the state finds that an institution is under investigation, they should immediately take action and they didn't," Glasper said.