About 25% made it into employee paychecks. The data is unclear if it had any propensity to save jobs. The other 75% went to bank accounts of businesses who had employees. I wouldn't call it fraud. If the government says "here's free money for rich people" and they say "thanks, here's my account number to deposit the money" it's not really fraud. It's just how the program was designed to work. PPP payments are highly positively correlated with real estate purchases immediately after - specifically resort area homes. I suspect there would be an even higher correlation between PPP recipeients and new luxury car and truck purchases, but I'm not aware of any studies that match PPP reciptient addresses to new car registrations. Interestingly - I think AI could now scrape the data pretty quickly to find out. Maybe if I have some time I'll try to test a sample data set to see how many PPP recipients registered new luxury cars within the year after.
If any state publishes the data - might be interesing to look at how many LC250's were bought by PPP recipients.
Just sayin - the group of people I know who were buying new TRXs, Raptors, and similar in the last two years were all PPP recipients and flush with cash.
According to Grok 3:
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There’s plenty of evidence showing fraud among recipients of Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) funds since its rollout in 2020. The program, designed to help small businesses keep employees on payroll during the COVID-19 pandemic, disbursed around $800 billion through the Small Business Administration (SBA). But its rushed implementation and lax oversight created a playground for abuse.
The SBA’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) estimated in 2023 that over $200 billion—roughly 17% of total PPP funds—may have been fraudulent. They flagged issues like identity theft, inflated payrolls, and loans to ineligible entities. By mid-2023, collaboration with agencies like the U.S. Secret Service had recovered nearly $30 billion, a fraction of the suspected losses, hinting at the scale of the problem.
Real-world cases back this up. The Department of Justice (DOJ) has prosecuted hundreds of individuals since 2020. Take Mustafa Qadiri from California—convicted in 2021 for using fake companies to snag $5 million, which he spent on luxury cars like a Ferrari. Or a Kansas City group indicted in 2023 for a $240,000 scam involving bogus applications. By early 2025, the DOJ reported recovering over $1.4 billion in misused funds, with cases still piling up.
Data analysis paints a broader picture.
A 2022 study by MIT economists found that only 23% to 34% of PPP dollars actually saved jobs that would’ve been lost, suggesting much of the rest went to owners or stakeholders—some legitimately, some not. Another study from the University of San Diego in 2025 pegged 6% of $590 million in PPP funds to investment advisors as fraudulent, extrapolating to potentially $39 billion across the program. The SBA itself flagged 2.3 million loans (about $189 billion) for review by 2021, with 95% of all loans forgiven despite these red flags.
Fraudsters exploited weak controls. Lenders faced little liability, and the SBA didn’t cross-check applications with IRS data or share fraud alerts across banks in real time. This let applicants “shop” for lax lenders. Posts on X and reports like NBC’s 2022 estimate of $80 billion stolen highlight how rampant this was—think fake farms in Miami or mansions bought with “emergency” funds.
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If I had raked in some of that sweet PPP cash, I would’ve bought at least a 2010. But alas, I’m stuck with my 2009.
