Pandemic Response Accountability Committee Fraud Alert and Fraud Prevention Alert

Case summary

This page is not a court case. It collects four fraud alerts from the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee (PRAC) dated January 2023 to June 2025. The January 2023 alert reports 69,323 questionable Social Security Numbers used to obtain $5.4 billion in potentially fraudulent COVID-19 EIDL and PPP loans between April 2020 and October 2022, from an analysis of over 33 million applications, and notes possible false positives from fuzzy matching. The May 2023 follow-up reports that 3,222 of 15,307 Social Security Numbers belonging to deceased individuals were used on COVID-19 EIDL and PPP applications and that 305 were paid, totaling $37,893,234, and states that a data mismatch does not prove an improper or fraudulent payment. The May 2025 alert flags 43,680 individuals whose income derived from sole proprietor PPP loans was at least 10 times the income they reported to HUD for housing assistance, on more than $860M in PPP loans. The June 2025 alert estimates, from a random sample of 662,000 identity records out of 67.5 million funded applications, that $79 billion was disbursed to applicants using over 1.4 million potentially stolen or invalid Social Security Numbers: $55.8 billion in COVID-19 EIDL, $13.8 billion in PPP and $9.8 billion in pandemic unemployment insurance. All four are PRAC estimates of potential fraud, not adjudicated amounts.