Identifying fraudulent PPP loans through network analysis
I hope that the federal government devotes hundreds of millions of dollars to research to identify this $80B in fraud and waste and hold each and every person, entity, leader, whatever, accountable - and figuratively burn them at the stake.<p>The PPP program&#x27;s &quot;spirt&quot; was absolutely decimated by thousands of money grabbing small business owners who had single owner LLCs etc in businesses that were not dramatically affected by the pandemic, and typically in high earning professions such as lawyers, accountants, real estate agents etc - all of these people got complete handouts of tens of thousands of dollars of cold hard cash in loans that were completely forgiven.  Everyone knows a real estate agent that has absolutely killed it in the last 2 years, and they also took PPP loans in the tens of thousands of dollars.  It&#x27;s disgusting.<p>I get that the &quot;uncertainty&quot; of the time necessitated people to take a hard look into the abyss and make some hard choices moving forward, but a lot of what I pointed out was absolute grift and disgusting.  And we won&#x27;t even talk about some of the businesses that worked their tails off to get funding and PPP loans (restaurants, retail etc) that had terrible times working through the maze of getting the loans.  The disparity is disgusting.  There IS a reason why trying to buy a top end Mercedes or BMW has been difficult, and it isn&#x27;t ALL chip shortages and supply chain issues.<p>I own a two member LLC that is an amazing successful business, and we KILLED IT during the pandemic, and I could have easily applied for 90K in loans that would have been forgiven, but I made the conscious moral decision that I didn&#x27;t need it, and there were more deserving business owners and firms that really did need that money.<p>It&#x27;s gross and disgusting.<p>I hope projects like this continue to peel back the onion and nails these people to the wall.  I frankly don&#x27;t care that the government said &quot;take the money.&quot;