But Moravek, now a director at the Kaufman Rossin accounting firm, pointed to websites such as as examples of just how easily these frauds are perpetrated. “I haven’t seen anything that overshadows this,” Moravek, who started his career in the 1990s tracking down “prime bank guarantee” bonds, fictitious instruments peddled by con artists to gullible investors, said of CARES Act scams.įew of the CARES Act court filings identify how the defendants secured their doctored paperwork. Under the administration’s rules, lenders were “held harmless for borrowers’ failure to comply with program criteria” as part of its goal of acting expeditiously.īanks could thus suspend their normal due diligence, setting up “one of the top frauds of all time,” said BJ Moravek, a former Secret Service agent and bank examiner. The SBA’s Paycheck Protection Program was particularly susceptible to fraud because banks were urged to quickly get money out to prevent the pandemic from causing an economic crisis. Justice Department is throwing more resources into identifying and prosecuting these fraudsters, with the Secret Service estimating that more than $100 billion has been stolen from a range of programs under the Coronavirus Aid Relief and Economic Security Act. When Congress authorized as much as $669 billion in forgivable pandemic loans from the Small Business Administration two years ago, a large chunk of that money disappeared into the hands of bad actors who claimed to run businesses in need of funds. “Sites like this are designed to create documents that evade automated fraud detection tools, and even human underwriters,” said Jesse Carlson, general counsel of commercial-finance lender Kapitus, and a former counsel in the professional liability and financial crimes section of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.

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