The temptation to lie on a COVID relief fund application.... The U.S. Attorney's Office in St. Louis says thousands in the region may have thought they could get away with it.
"It is just really, really difficult for ordinarily law-abiding people to say no to free money," the U.S. Attorney's White Collar Crime Supervisor here, Gwen Carroll tells KMOX, "This program was free money. And the restrictions on it were so, so limited."
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Carroll says there are between 1,800 and 2,500 COVID scam cases in the region. She says they are catching people who never got in trouble before in their life. But also, "there's a public database that lists everyone that got COVID relief money, and you just type in the name of the people you're investigating for robberies or for carjackings, and lo and behold it will turn out that they got a sole proprietorship PPP loan in addition to everything else."
Of the 70 open cases right now, she says none have gone to trial yet, because the evidence is so well documented in the applications, that they all pled guilty.
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