Lydia DePillis

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Identity and role

Lydia DePillis is an economy reporter whose public profiles identify past work at ProPublica and later work at The New York Times. She co-authored ProPublica's Kabbage fake-farms investigation with Derek Willis.

Pandemic-relief role

The May 18, 2021 ProPublica story found 378 PPP loans, about $7 million, to single-person "farms" that did not exist in their states' business records, from potato fields in Palm Beach to orange groves in Minnesota. All of them came through Kabbage, which had processed nearly 300,000 first-round PPP loans. On the Jersey Shore, "Ritter Wheat Club" and "Deely Nuts" each got $20,833, the maximum for a sole proprietor. A cattle ranch called "Beefy King" was registered to the home of the mayor of Long Beach Township, who told the reporters he had three dogs and no cows.

Nine days later, on May 27, 2021, House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis chairman James Clyburn wrote to Kabbage's chief executive demanding documents. His letter cites the ProPublica story in its first two footnotes. DePillis and Willis reported the inquiry on May 28, 2021; the Subcommittee also wrote to BlueVine, Celtic Bank and Cross River Bank.

What followed

The Subcommittee's December 1, 2022 staff report, "We Are Not the Fraud Police," gave Kabbage its own section and used the same fake-farm examples, among them "Deely Nuts," whose address was a beachfront vacation rental. Kabbage's remaining company had filed for bankruptcy in October 2022. In 2024 its estate settled two False Claims Act cases with the Justice Department over inflated loan amounts, not over the fake farms. The story's finding is reporting, not a court finding. The court records are on the Kabbage profile.

Since 2025

Her move to The New York Times is cited to LinkedIn, which is self-reported.

Documents on this site

Original source documents and archived copies

• Derek Willis and Lydia DePillis, "Hundreds of PPP Loans Went to Fake Farms in Absurd Places," ProPublica, May 18, 2021
• ProPublica hiring announcement, Lydia DePillis
• ProPublica profile, Lydia DePillis

Sources

• Derek Willis and Lydia DePillis, "Hundreds of PPP Loans Went to Fake Farms in Absurd Places," ProPublica, May 18, 2021 (378 loans / ~$7M, all via Kabbage): Derek Willis and Lydia DePillis, "Hundreds of PPP Loans Went to Fake Farms in Absurd Places," ProPublica, May 18, 2021 (original: propublica.org · stored capture)
• Lydia DePillis and Derek Willis, "An Online Lender Gave Hundreds of PPP Loans to Fake Farms. Now Congress Is Investigating," ProPublica, May 28, 2021: An Online Lender Gave Hundreds of PPP Loans to Fake Farms (original: propublica.org · stored capture)
• ProPublica profile, Lydia DePillis: Lydia DePillis previously worked with ProPublica as a Reporter (original: propublica.org · stored capture)
• ProPublica hiring announcement, Lydia DePillis: ProPublica announced Tuesday that Lydia DePillis is joining its Washington, D.C., newsroom as a reporter covering trade and the economy (original: propublica.org · stored capture)
• LinkedIn profile, Lydia DePillis — original: linkedin.com (self-reported profile; LinkedIn pages cannot be mirrored into the archive)
• Chairman James E. Clyburn to Rob Frohwein, Kabbage, Inc. (May 27, 2021), pp. 1 nn.1–2
• House Select Subcommittee staff report, "We Are Not the Fraud Police" (Dec. 1, 2022), pp. 63, 70 The House report is a partisan staff document released by the Democratic majority's staff in the final weeks of the 117th Congress, with no public hearing and no sworn testimony; an arbitrator refused it as "rank hearsay" that relied on companies then in arbitration with Womply, and a federal judge declined to take judicial notice of its findings (about the report).
• ProPublica, "An Online Lender Gave Hundreds of PPP Loans to Fake Farms. Now Congress Is Investigating." (May 28, 2021)
• Kabbage bankruptcy case filings, No. 22-10951 (Bankr. D. Del.)