The U.S. Secret Service returned $286 million in fraudulently obtained pandemic aid loans to the Small Business Administration, the agency announced Friday.
The funds sent back to the SBA were obtained via the Economic Injury Disaster Loan (EIDL) program using each fabricated information and stolen identities.
The suspects used Green Dot Bank, a fintech institution, to carry and move the fraudulent funds. Greater than 15,000 accounts were utilized in the conspiracy, by individuals within the U.S. in addition to domestic and transnational organized crime rings, the agency said.
Investigations are ongoing and further details about suspects was not immediately released. The investigation was initiated by the Secret Service field office in Orlando, Florida, and Green Dot bank worked with the agency to discover the fraudulent accounts.
“Fraudsters typically are at all times searching for ways and techniques to raised do their crimes and modern conveniences are only certainly one of those things they use. So currently, cryptocurrency is an enormous thing, fintechs, third-party payment systems. But there’s not an establishment, even our traditional financial institutions, that weren’t targeted through the pandemic,” Roy Dotson, lead investigator for the Secret Service, told CNBC in an interview.
Initial investigations indicated nearly all of the fraudulent accounts at Green Dot were established with synthetic and stolen identities, and involved using “willing and unwilling money mules,” Dotson said.
The Secret Service and SBA Office of Inspector General put out advisories to 30,000 financial institutions in early 2020 to put out fraud indicators and guide the banks to partner with federal agencies to get well fraudulent funds, Dotson said. He added these investigations will likely last years attributable to their size and scope.
OIG Inspector General Hannibal Ware said the partnership with the Secret Service has up to now resulted in greater than 400 indictments and nearly 300 convictions related to pandemic fraud.
The U.S. government allocated greater than $1 trillion to Essential Street under each the Paycheck Protection Program and EIDL program. The PPP allowed small businesses to borrow loans that could be forgiven if the borrower used nearly all of the capital on payroll, while the Covid-19 EIDL program allowed borrowers to access loans based on temporary losses of revenue attributable to the pandemic. An advance grant was also available under the EIDL.
Reviews of the 2 programs by the SBA’s Office of Inspector General warned that criminals would potentially exploit the system attributable to the fast-moving nature of the rollout and demand for aid. CNBC investigations revealed, in some cases, how easy it was for criminals to acquire fraudulent aid via stolen identities.
The SBA OIG said it has identified $87 billion of doubtless fraudulent EIDL loans.
Over the past two years, the Secret Service said it has seized over $1.4 billion in fraudulently obtained funds and assisted in returning some $2.3 billion to state unemployment insurance programs. Nearly 4,000 pandemic-related fraud investigations and inquiries have been initiated by the Secret Service. Greater than 150 field offices and 40 cyber task forces are involved.
“This shouldn’t be going to be a fast fix. As we talked about today, 15,325 accounts at one financial institution — that is one case, so you may just consider the potential variety of suspects and what number of investigations that would come out of those. And with all of our federal, state and native partners working this and having the identical mission. It will be an extended process,” Dotson said at a news conference announcing the returned funds.
