Posted on 01/26/2022 11:54:12 AM PST by 11th_VA
One woman being prosecuted in Atlanta for defrauding the Paycheck Protection Program is a Walmart bakery worker. Authorities say she helped a cousin apply for pandemic bailout loans in a multi-state scheme involving phony businesses.
Another defendant runs a trucking company and, according to his indictment, hired a financial adviser who helped him and at least four other business owners obtain $300,000 in pandemic loans using falsified documents and inflated employee numbers.
And the University of Texas study found suspicious loans clustered in regions of the country, including Atlanta, where FinTechs had the largest market share.
“A lot of these lenders, they’ve made almost pure profit off of this program by basically letting fraudsters have access to billions of dollars in loan money,” Nick Schwellenbach, a senior investigator for the Project on Government Oversight, said. “They probably won’t be held accountable, and it’s the bigger crime here, even though it won’t probably lead to charges.”... Also accused is a Roswell limousine service proprietor said to have masterminded an $11.1 million scheme involving 21 other defendants and 14 companies, none of which had any actual employees. He allegedly used loan proceeds to treat himself to a Mercedes-Benz, an Acura NSX sports car, a Range Rover and a gold Rolex.
In all three cases, court records show, borrowers relied on New Jersey-based Cross River Bank to approve many of their applications. Cross River, along with financial technology firms that automate lending, processed hundreds of thousands of forgivable business relief loans.
... Records show the federal government paid them billions in processing fees as loans flew out the door.
Some FinTechs even seemed to specialize in questionable loans, according to a recent study out of the University of Texas on how FinTechs may have facilitated fraud in the business relief programs...
(Excerpt) Read more at ajc.com ...
PPP program was administered through commercial banks.
My firm works with a well-known mid-size regional bank. We had to jump through hoops, hold various meetings to discuss what exactly was allowed, whose salaries were counted, etc... had our PPP loan request amount revised and changed several times, etc...
No way our bank would have made the loan if they did not know us very well
If fraud is occurring, it means that the commercial banks PPP loans went through are in on it.
All the government can doe is collect tax money and spend it. They have no desire nor ability to actually track it to see if it is properly spent.
Exactly what I had to go through, and I’m a small business.
One of the owners here in our Industrial Park might be prosecuted, he was putting any employee on unemployment with the added bonus the feds paid on it who wanted to go, with a 10% kickback. They got to sit and home playing video games and drinking beer, he got 10% of what they were pulling in to let them do it, and the PPP was collected as well.
Here is a website that lists how much each company got for PPP.
https://www.federalpay.org/paycheck-protection-program
Before I retired I worked for a steel scrapper. The only actual employees this company has are family members. The scrappers are contract, (most likely) illegal aliens and I would bet anything they did not miss a paycheck. The company got $1.6 million for PPP. The whole thing was a sham.
My son worked for the disaster arm of the Small Business Administration that oversaw these loans right after he graduated from college in 2020. It was his first real “office” job (of course remote). He did a good job contacting recipients of these loans to try to figure out if they were legit and not fraudsters. But he said the system/application used for his work was really slow, and bad.
I know someone who has her own business as a financial advisor and took the PPP loan and used it for rent for a beautiful new apartment overlooking the ocean. The money lasts about one more year, and then she’ll move. . .
No biggie, they only lost Billions. That’s what happens when you are playing with other people’s money.
That’s a good link. I saw a few Good Will organizations max out loan requests as well. Very suspicious…
wow … just wow …
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.