Pump & Dump

The application took six minutes. The prison sentence took forty-one months.

Currin Caridine ran a kickback assembly line through the PPP program, recruiting Mainers and New Hampshire residents into fake applications for businesses that did not exist. The Small Business Administration paid out roughly $475,000 before the machine got names.

Latest
Ponzi / Pyramid

The detective who knew the paperwork was the lock and the key

John Bolden wore a shield by day and ran a tax prep franchise on the side. Federal prosecutors say he used the second job to feed the first one's friends, family, and clients into a pandemic relief program he knew nobody was watching.

Real Estate

He stole from the relief fund. Then he stole again to pay the court back.

Levelle Joseph Harris already owed the federal government $1.28 million for stealing pandemic relief. To pay it off, prosecutors say, he ran a second scheme. The court called it a bogus mortgage deal. The trapdoor opened twice.

Pump & Dump

WS Capital was registered with the SEC. That sentence was the whole machine.

Thomas Aaron Signorelli sold a sentence, not a strategy. The sentence was true on its face and a lie in its meaning, and it carried more than $1.9 million in losses before a federal judge in San Francisco closed the file.

Pump & Dump

The applications were the business. The business was the applications.

Nikenson Jean Mathurin sat at a keyboard in Sparta, New Jersey, and built fifteen businesses that did not exist. A federal jury in Newark needed four days to see what he had actually built.

The Daily Brief

The relief line had a back door, and the chef knew where it opened

Mark Tell · May 29

The badge clocked in at the jail. The benefits app said he was unemployed.

Mark Tell · May 29

The relief program had a door. He walked through it eighty-five thousand times.

Elena Ruiz · May 19

The Porsche cost sixty thousand dollars. The ambulance company had been closed for two years.

Mark Tell · May 18

The application said one hundred employees. The company had none.

Mark Tell · May 15

The tax preparer's office was the door. The PPP loan was the room behind it.

Elena Ruiz · May 13
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