CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Members of the Amish community traditionally have settled their scores independent of secular society, but the federal legal system will decide the fate of Monroe Beachy, 77, of Sugarcreek, Holmes County.

Wednesday with defrauding thousands of his fellow Amish farmers, carpenters and neighbors of tens of millions of dollars in an alleged Ponzi scheme that has earned Beachy a nickname: The Amish Bernie Madoff.

Beachy, who has a 10th-grade education, acquired much of his financial knowledge from classes at H&R Block. He declared bankruptcy in 2010. He faces one count of mail fraud, and was expected to surrender to federal authorities by Friday. Judge Benita Pearson, whose courtroom is in Youngstown, will preside over the case.

U.S. Attorney Steven Dettelbach said Beachy's victims suffered an average loss of $13,000.

"While that might not seem like a lot of money to Wall Street, I can assure you it's a lot of money for these hard-working people," Dettelbach said.

Since 1990, Beachy raised an estimated $33 million from more than 2,600 investors -- many of them fellow members of the Amish community who reside in this pastoral locale about a two-hour drive south of Cleveland.

Included among his investors were widows and retirees, children, a Mennonite church, and a school cookbook fund, prosecutors said.

Beachy gained access to these nontraditional investment sources via his position as treasurer of the Amish Helping Fund, a nonprofit that took in money from investors and made real estate loans in an effort to preserve the Amish way of life.

By the time the Securities and Exchange Commission had charged Beachy with fraud in February, he had lost nearly half of his investors' money, about $16.8 million, Dettelbach said.

Beachy had assured his investors that their money was safe, earning higher returns than banks in U.S. government securities, and he issued periodic statements that were fictitious, Dettelbach said.

In reality, Beachy and his company, A&M Investments, had lost nearly all of his investors' money by 1998 in speculative investments such as risky stocks, mutual funds and junk bonds. But he continued to solicit investments from new investors, investigators said, and used the money to repay earlier investors -- a so-called Ponzi scheme similar to that operated by the infamous Bernard Madoff, which had cheated investors out of an estimated $18 billion by the time he was caught in 2008.

Madoff's was the largest investment swindle in U.S. history and earned him a sentence of 150 years in prison.

Beachy, on the other hand, faces a maximum prison term of 20 years if convicted of the single count of mail fraud, Dettelbach said.

Since Beachy's bankruptcy filing, Sugarcreek's Amish community has been in turmoil, with many victims upset at being dragged into court rather than resolving the case among the Plain People themselves.

Some of Beachy's creditors argue that forcing them to pursue claims through the court would be a violation of their religious freedom.

Members of the Amish community in Sugarcreek were embarrassed by the unflattering light the Beachy case cast them in. Rather than relying on bankruptcy court, some of the Amish would prefer to resolve the case within the community. Many have donated money to pay back the victims, and thousands of dollars have been raised.

But the total amount of the losses may never be recouped.

Dettelbach said the Beachy case should send a warning to all potential investors.

"Even in hard times such as these, you have to remember that, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is," Dettelbach said.