Phillip Collins of Robeson County, North Carolina pleaded guilty on June 29 to wire fraud conspiracy in a COVID-era SBA loan scheme. The pattern is small, ordinary, and still running through other names.
Currin Caridine ran a kickback assembly line through the PPP program, recruiting Mainers and New Hampshire residents into fake applications for businesses that did not exist. The Small Business Administration paid out roughly $475,000 before the machine got names.
Christopher Staggs ran his pandemic unemployment scheme out of a Chicago LLC and kept a ledger of the people whose identities fueled it. On June 9, 2026, a federal judge gave him two years.
John Bolden wore a shield by day and ran a tax prep franchise on the side. Federal prosecutors say he used the second job to feed the first one's friends, family, and clients into a pandemic relief program he knew nobody was watching.
Levelle Joseph Harris already owed the federal government $1.28 million for stealing pandemic relief. To pay it off, prosecutors say, he ran a second scheme. The court called it a bogus mortgage deal. The trapdoor opened twice.
Thomas Aaron Signorelli sold a sentence, not a strategy. The sentence was true on its face and a lie in its meaning, and it carried more than $1.9 million in losses before a federal judge in San Francisco closed the file.