An Olympic gold medalist gave a stranger $150K after he promised to double it in a month. Now she’s a financial planner

Williams, now 43, is a certified financial planner in Dallas. She talked about the loss with Washington Post columnist Michelle Singletary on the video podcast “Dollars & Sense With Michelle Singletary,” and Singletary wrote about the conversation on Oct. 27.

“I should have asked a lot more questions,” Williams said. She also wishes she’d made the businessman put the whole deal on paper.

On the track, Williams won silver in the 100 meters at the 2004 Athens Games and relay gold in London in 2012. She later took up bobsled and won silver at Sochi in 2014. No American woman had won medals at both a Summer and a Winter Olympics before her.

But scams can, and do, affect anyone and everyone. Today, investment scams are the costliest kind of fraud people report to the FTC. Those scams accounted for $7.9 billion of the $15.9 billion in fraud losses reported in 2025, the agency told Congress on March 25.

How Williams lost money to bad advice and a bad deal

Early in her career, Williams had two financial advisors who barely paid attention to her. Running her investments herself didn’t go any better.

Williams also remembers NFL players who put money into a casino because an advisor talked them into it. It never opened for business, and they lost every dollar they’d put in.

Those experiences are partly why Williams ended up as an advisor herself. Her own advisors hadn’t impressed her, and she was sure she’d be better at the work than they were. By her early 30s, she was a CFP and had started a firm called Worth Winning, which is fee-only, works with clients online and focuses on pro athletes and millennials.

In Switzerland, Williams once spoke with another athlete who had probably earned two or three times as much as she had, yet had “no clue what to do with his finances,” she said. She wants to help people like him.

“I didn’t know that I was financially illiterate,” Williams said. “I knew I didn’t know a lot about money, but I didn’t know how dangerous it was to not have somebody who was going to guide me, who was not focused on my literacy.”