Massachusetts car magnate Herb Chambers has agreed to pay $11.8 million to the federal government to resolve allegations that his companies fraudulently applied for and received pandemic small business relief loans.
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Smh, they should have called @bumboola lmao
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I am no lawyer, not even one for ABA purposes 
However, my hunch is that HC always wanted to settle. It was probably part of the “agreement” he made for the sale to go through.
Lose a few Millions to score a Billion.
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I’m so mad about the PPP loans. So much fraud and so many companies didn’t deserve those loans that others weren’t able to get. Ridiculous that companies that were forced to shut down got pennies while unaffected companies got paid.
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Don’t even get me started on PPP. The stories I could tell you of folks abusing the heck out of it. I don’t even want to guess what percentage of those were fraud.
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Aren’t folks still going to jail for that?
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Some will, but there was such an absurd amount of fraud, I don’t even know how you fully police it. They will go after the big fish, and they’ll avoid the small businesses that abused it to preserve optics.
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Found one from this year.
U.S. District Court Judge Michael P. Mills ordered Pearson to repay $15,942,586.77 in restitution in that case.
U.S. District Court Judge Sharion Aycock also ordered the Pearsons to repay $3,364,052 in restitution.
One couple + two fraud cases = ~$20M. That’s taxpayer money.
Where was DOGE when we needed them?
But it wasn’t even just fraud, which was a huge problem, it was the fact that the program was terribly designed and executed. It was a replacement for unemployment and covid unaffected larger small companies. I remember having the C suite of a top 10 bank in America confused on how to do these loans. Construction companies that made bank got paid but barely any restaurants got barely any money. None of the 2 barber shops that I know got paid. They should have done it by NAICS code but it was a clusterfuck. I’m still mad lol
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That’s a big fish though monetarily. I have a basic understanding of how those loans were calculated, and they would’ve had to write down slap you in your face offensive employment data. Embarrassing that wasn’t caught out of the gate. That just shows how bad the fraud became.
Oh yeah, banks clicked 4 buttons and approved. It was a joke, but it wasn’t their fault. They were just following what the government told them to do.
Nah this was in the beginning back in April of 2020. It was such a fiasco since I’m in NJ and our bookkeeping and accounting firm was in NYC and remote work (zoom) wasn’t a thing yet lol. Second round was so much easier.
If you knew a banker, it was rubber stamp city. I agree second round was much easier, but the first round was just as easy for those that had a banker connection.
This program infuriated me to my core.
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Was it really like that in the first month? I remember everyone scrambling. The problem for my tenants were that they were super small businesses (like 50k monthly revenue or less)
I mean they could have also said, if the government shut you down, you got paid. Not this faux unemployment BS lol
$250M pandemic fraud:
This takes the cake - $140m from prison inmates in CA
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Is there a way to report the fraud, I know of a company on Amazon that has 3 accounts and got 3 loans, even though there all pretty much the same person