Pandemic fraud, five years on: 2,709 federal cases, $4.1 billion charged in resolved cases
On a narrow screen, scroll each chart sideways to see all of it.
Build note: 4 of the 14 static charts were rendered on 2026-06-19, three on 2026-09-24, three on 2026-09-30 and four on 2026-10-09, when the case table, its tiles and the charts drawn from it were rebuilt from data release v18; the table, the filters and the tiles are built from the 2,709 releases this page carries. A chart can therefore run a few releases behind the table: the sentencing charts count 785 sentenced defendants, where this page’s data gives 791 sentencing releases. The case-status chart was redrawn on 2026-09-24 from this page’s data (699 charged, 791 sentenced).
Start with the number everyone repeats: more than $200 billion of pandemic business loans was “potentially fraudulent,” per the SBA’s own Inspector General, plus $100–135 billion of unemployment fraud per the GAO. Those are real estimates — but they are built from statistical indicators (duplicate addresses, reused IP addresses, dead Social Security numbers), not courtroom findings. Set them next to what the prosecutions actually account for: about 2,005 federal convictions (guilty pleas and trial verdicts, as of December 31, 2023), and $4.1 billion of charged dollars across the resolved cases whose DOJ release states a figure you can check against the release itself. Convictions undercount real fraud — most of it will never be prosecuted, and the ten-year filing window runs into the 2030s. But the distance between “a computer flagged this loan” and “a jury convicted this person” is the distance between an estimate and a fact.
Flagged is not the same as proven
SBA's Inspector General estimates that more than $200B of PPP and COVID-EIDL money was potentially fraudulent (June 2023); GAO puts unemployment-insurance fraud at $100–135B (September 2023). The two measure different programs in different ways, so they sit on separate bars and are not added. Cases that ended in a plea or verdict account for $4.1B of charged dollars, the full amount charged and an upper bound on what any court found was lost. Cases whose release states no checkable figure still count as cases here; they just carry no dollars, which makes the $4.1B a floor.
Even the estimates disagree — and EIDL leaked worst
SBA's watchdog flags about 8% of PPP dollars as potentially fraudulent but 33% of COVID-EIDL — the program the government handed out directly, without the fintech middlemen that took the blame for PPP. The GAO puts unemployment fraud at 11–15%.
And where there is real fraud, it should be trivial to prove
PPP and EIDL fraud is a documentary crime: a federal form signed under penalty of law against the government's own records. The same data matches that built the $200B estimate — dead Social Security numbers, EINs registered after the pandemic began, no IRS payroll behind a claimed payroll — are the evidence. The low conviction count is about prosecutorial capacity and small-dollar triage, not difficulty of proof.
…and in people as well as dollars
About 1,045 PPP/EIDL fraud convictions (SBA OIG, March 2025), and about 2,005 across all pandemic programs (DOJ, as of December 31, 2023), against more than 15 million SBA loans. Convictions are a floor: most fraud is never charged, and prosecutors have until the 2030s.
Pandemic fraud was a retail crime
Forget the $2 billion headlines. The median scheme the Justice Department charged is $1.2 million — one fake business, a loan or two. Four in ten come in under $1 million, and the ten biggest schemes carry nearly a quarter of all the dollars between them.
Where the cases landed
Florida leads, with 251 cases — more than California or New York. The map is part crime scene and part prosecutorial temperament: it shows where U.S. Attorneys brought cases, which tracks both where the fraud was and which offices went looking for it. Massachusetts and the Middle District of Florida punch far above their population.
The crime came first. The reckoning is still going.
The money went out in 2020 and 2021, while the programs were open. The indictments and sentencings are still landing in 2026 — and will keep landing. In 2022 Congress pushed the statute of limitations on PPP and EIDL fraud out to ten years, so prosecutors have until the early 2030s to file.
Which programs got hit
PPP and EIDL are what people mean by pandemic fraud, and they dominate the case count. The Employee Retention Credit barely registers by number of cases — and quietly owns the top of the dollar leaderboard.
Plead, don't fight
When the government already holds your loan application, your signature, and your bank records, the play is to plead. Guilty pleas beat trial convictions more than four to one.
Everything is wire fraud
Wire fraud is the workhorse charge — it appears in well over half of all cases. It's the statute for “you lied to get money through a computer,” which is most of what happened here. Money laundering, bank fraud, and aggravated identity theft fill out the stack defendants usually face all at once.
Most did it alone. The crews were charged with more.
Two-thirds of releases describe someone working alone. The third who teamed up charged out bigger: a $1.8 million median against $1.00 million.
The biggest schemes weren't PPP
The largest schemes the DOJ has charged are tax-credit and health-care-billing operations, several of them amounts merely sought. PPP and EIDL produced the volume; ERC and Medicare produced the whales.
The case data carries a “sentence” field, but it captures the statutory maximum a charge could carry, not what defendants got. These two charts use the site's criminal sentences table instead: of its 1,131 records, 784 carry an analysis-grade prison term under the cleaning rule on the sentences chart page.
The median sentence is about three years
Of the 784 prison terms, the median is 36 months, about three years. It rises with the dollar amount in the case, from 18 months under $100,000 to 84 months at $10 million or more, and it differs by fraud family, from 24 months for EIDL borrower fraud to 50 months for identity or unemployment-insurance fraud.
Stealing more buys more prison — but the line is noisy
Each dot is one sentencing record with a case amount, 739 of the 784. The relationship between dollars and months is real but loose: a fraud under $250,000 can draw more time than one over $5 million, because role and narrative — borrower, tax preparer, identity ring, lender-side operator — matter as much as the number. The 0 records whose amount is a program-wide total above $1 billion are left off.
The recovery ledger follows 31 concluded cases through the money stages their documents print, from the amount obtained to restitution, forfeiture and seizure; in 28 a court ordered restitution, and two documents record money returned or collected.
| Amount ▾ | Date | State | Programs | Status | Case (links to DOJ release) |
|---|
Pandemic Darlings — primary documents on the pandemic, five years on. Charts and data are reusable; each links back to the underlying DOJ source.