US: In a multi-million dollar Covid fraud case, two men of Indian descent entered guilty pleas

According to the judicial department, two American males of Indian descent have admitted to taking part in a multi-million dollar fraud scam by applying for loans under an economic assistance program when the Covid-19 outbreak hit the nation.

Among the five individuals who illegally received and laundered millions of dollars in forgiven Paycheck Protection Programme (PPP) loans that the Small Business Administration (SBA) guarantees under the CARES Act, Nishant Patel, 41, and Harjeet Singh, 49, were among them.

The Department of Justice said in a statement that they acknowledged submitting fictitious and fraudulent PPP loan applications to the SBA and certain SBA-approved PPP lenders. By providing co-conspirators with blank, endorsed checks that were made payable to individuals acting as employees of the businesses that got the PPP loan but who were not really employees, all five defendants also helped in the laundering of the PPP loan monies that had been unlawfully acquired.

Then, these fictitious paychecks were cashed at check-cashing businesses that other conspirators owned. According to the statement, Patel and Singh each received a fake and fraudulent PPP loan of around USD 474,993 and USD 937,379, respectively, as part of the conspiracy. The three other fraudsters received a combined sum of almost USD 1.4 million, it said.

They will each get a maximum term of five years in jail when they are sentenced on January 4 of the following year. In addition to these five defendants, one other person was found guilty of participating in the conspiracy at trial, and 15 more people have admitted to taking part in the loan fraud scheme.