Feds Recover Less Than 1% of $400 Billion+ in COVID Relief Funds Lost to Fraudsters

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Feds Recover Less Than 1% of $400 Billion+ in COVID Relief Funds Lost to Fraudsters:

Carl Delano Torjagbo stole $13 million in COVID relief funds and false tax filing based on a fake overseas gold mining business with celebrities like Keanu Reeves among its 493 fictional employees. He also bought himself a Lamborghini Aventador, a BMW M850xi, and $15,000 worth of plastic surgery.

Torjagbo is serving a nearly 15-year prison sentence and has been ordered to pay $3.7 million in restitution. But a new analysis by Open the Books (OTB) suggests there are hundreds, maybe thousands, more Torjagbos out there who, to date, have gotten away with defrauding the federal government out of far more than the official government estimate of $300 billion lost in COVID relief programs like the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP).

Under both Presidents Donald Trump and his successor Joe Biden, “Congress authorized about $4.6 trillion in emergency COVID-19 relief between 2020 and 2021 for vulnerable businesses and struggling families, but fraud was identified in at least 19 different pandemic-relief programs, according to an April 2025 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report. If the government’s $300 billion fraud calculation is correct, then 6.5% of all pandemic aid was incorrectly distributed. What we have compiled is just a fraction of the hundreds of charged cases and undetected schemes,” OTB cautioned in its report.

Using the $300 billion official estimate, that works out to $2,260 for each of the 135 million U.S. households. In a previous report, however, OTB exposed $400 billion in fraud, so the total cost per household could be $3,013, according to the nonprofit government watchdog. If, as seems likely given the qualifications of the official estimates from GAO and other government sources, the actual total could approach $1 trillion, meaning the cost for every American household could approach $10,000.

The Small Business Administration (SBA) was a major focal point of federal assistance during the pandemic, and two of the biggest such programs included its PPP and the Economic Injury Disaster Loan (EIDL) operation. Both programs were frequent targets of fraudsters in the U.S. and overseas, including in Russia, China, Nigeria, and other countries. Between them, the two programs disbursed more than $1.2 trillion in tax-funded assistance.

The OTB analysis pointed to a report by SBA’s Inspector General (IG) who claimed 17% of all the PPP and EIDL spending, or approximately $200 billion, exhibited signs of fraudulent activity. The OTB analysis, however, reported that “an estimated $136 billion was stolen by criminals, con artists, and crime rings from around the world” — just from the PPP program.

A major obstacle to getting accurate numbers for the actual total lost to fraud at SBA is the agency’s weak oversight processes of the PPP and EIDL expenditures, according to GAO.

Similar losses to fraud were reported in the OTB analysis of the Department of Labor’s pandemic programs. “Congress created four new and temporary emergency unemployment insurance programs in the wake of the pandemic, including Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA), which extended benefits to gig workers and the self-employed. Open the Books found that unemployment aid was robbed of $200 billion. The Labor Department’s Office of Inspector General (DOLIG) estimated that at least $191 billion could have been improper payments, with a ‘significant portion’ attributable to fraud. The DOL estimated that 35.9% of PUA payments were improper, translating to $47 billion of its $131 billion,” the OTB report explained. --->READ MORE HERE

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