Three postal workers, two of them in South Carolina, are accused of a nationwide scheme to defraud the federal COVID-19 Paycheck Protection Program.
Two of the women are, or were, U.S Postal Service employees in Florence County. The third is a former postal worker from Brooklyn, New York. The Justice Department says, they filed as many as 400 phony applications for paycheck protection loans during the height of the pandemic shutdowns generating at least a million dollars.
But, prosecutors told the federal magistrate when the three were arraigned in Florence the actual total could be as much as eight million. 40 year old Tiffany McFadden, the New Yorker who had also worked for the post office in Florida, is accused of masterminding the scheme.
The others are 43 year old Cherry Lewis from Johnsonville, South Carolina and Keisha Lewis, a 43 year old postal worker from Hemingway. All three were arrested by the Secret Service over the weekend.
