A recent court case shines a light on a major scheme involving the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) – a government program designed to help businesses during the COVID-19 pandemic. At the heart of it was an individual named Hockridge and her partners, who have been found guilty of serious charges related to defrauding the system. What happened? Stephanie Hockridge and her co-conspirators created a "personalized service" called "VIPPP." This service promised to help people apply for PPP loans. Sounds helpful, right? The problem is, they coached borrowers to submit applications with false information to get bigger loans. In return, Hockridge and her team took a "kickback" – a percentage of the loan money received by the borrowers, plus extra fees from the banks that processed the loans. Think of a kickback as an illegal payment given in exchange for a favor. In this case, it was for helping people cheat the system to get money they weren't e...
A Chicago lab owner, Zishan Alvi, 46, from Inverness, Illinois, was just sentenced to seven years in prison for a massive COVID-19 testing fraud scheme. From 2021 to 2022, Alvi ran a lab in Chicago that supposedly performed COVID-19 tests. But he was actually submitting fake bills to a government program called the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA). He charged them for tests that either never happened or were done so badly they were useless. Here's where it gets really bad: Alvi’s lab would give people negative test results even when they hadn't actually tested the samples, or the results were unclear because he'd watered down the tests to save money. He knew he was giving out bogus results but still sent the bills to HRSA. This scam ended up costing the government over $14 million. He even lied to his own lab directors to keep his fraud a secret. Alvi pleaded guilty to wire fraud last September. Besides going...