The COVID era Paycheck Protection Program was defrauded at an incredible scale. People received PPP loans for total nonsense at stunning rates.
Thread of funny claims.
Dodge Hellcat LLC
Reparations for Indigenous People LLC
Just Traffic Tickets
Free Money LLC
Lobster
They're Stealing Your Hubcaps Inc
Fuck the System LLC
PPP, LLC
Rent LLC
Just read it
I Got Lunch
Vacation
GR&ASS
Wakanda Murkledove
If you spend enough time going through this, it becomes apparent:
There are tons of businesses that have suspicious employee numbers (usually 1) and often enough, these suspicious loans were at the cap for sole proprietorships ($20,833), and they're addressed to wrong people.
The Small Business Administration estimated that at least 70,000 of these loans are fraudulent, and given that these are denominates in the thousands, that adds up fast.
People used these loans to buy Lamborghinis, Teslas, Ferraris, and lots of Dodge Hellcats.
The nature of fraudulent PPP loans seems to mirror other low-class behavior.
For example, tons of Hellcats obtained with PPP might be related to tons of Hellcats being targets for theft.
The excessive spending of PPP loans on travel might be related to record numbers of unruly plane passengers.
Excessive spending of PPP loans on lobster and crab was well-known.
I invite you to search for the keywords "crabs", "lobster", "steak", "travel", and so on coupled with "PPP". It's stunning.
Perhaps those record crab sales after loans went out were related.
Free Money! New Wakanda! Reparations!
There was an unreal amount of scamming going on and, per NBC, the dollar value may be 10% of the program's total spending.
A program designed to go after this and recover funds seems laudable, but I doubt they're very recoverable.
Ah well.
Here's a search tool if you want to look into this yourself: projects.propublica.org/coronavirus/ba… and h/t @ManDaveJobGood, who's been cataloguing so much of this.
NBC: nbcnews.com/politics/justi…
Hellcat theft: jgdattack.eu/blog/en/hellca…
Crabs: seafoodnews.com/Story/1183203/…
And yes, these things seem to be related:
Here's the estimated scale of the fraud from the Office of Inspector General at the U.S. Small Business Administration: sba.gov/document/repor…
Apparently Baltimore cops are going after known criminals for their PPP shenanigans.
If anyone has more info on this and anything like it, post it please.
As a reminder in case you skipped over it, Free Money LLC had their loans forgiven.
They got to keep that fraudulently obtained money.
Feel like a sucker yet?
As noted in the thread, there were also plenty of cases of people registering businesses to other people's addresses. You can even find people online claiming that they got PPP loans for businesses they didn't own.
It's not hard to see why this fraud could be hard to investigate
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