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The Department of Justice announced Wednesday that it has recently charged 78 people with $2.5 billion in separate health-care fraud and opioid abuse schemes, CNBC.com reported. The defendants allegedly defrauded programs used to take care of elderly and disabled people, and in some cases used the ill-gotten money to buy exotic cars, jewelry, and yachts, the DOJ said. Among those charged are 11 defendants accused of submitting $2 billion in fraudulent claims through telemedicine, as well as 10 defendants charged in connection with fraudulent prescription drug claims. In all, prosecutors filed charges against people in 16 states in cases that were lodged or unsealed in the past two weeks as part of the coordinated crackdown. The defendants include “physicians and other licensed medical professionals who lined their own pockets, including doctors who allegedly put their patients at risk by illegally providing them with opioids they did not need,” the DOJ said in a press release.

The Small Business Administration’s (SBA) oversight office released new findings, estimating that tens of billions of dollars disbursed by the agency through pandemic loans programs intended to help small businesses were paid to “potentially fraudulent actors,” The Hill reported. The SBA’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) said in a report on Tuesday that the agency disbursed about $1.2 trillion in COVID-19 Economic Injury Disaster Loan (EIDL) and Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) funds during the pandemic. But the OIG found “at least 17 percent of all COVID-19 EIDL and PPP funds were disbursed to potentially fraudulent actors.” That includes over $136 billion in EIDLs and $64 billion in PPP funds, the report found. The government watchdog said it identified multiple schemes that criminals used to steal taxpayer funds and saw some using the dollars to purchase “luxury homes, gold coins, diamonds, jewelry, luxury watches, fine imported furnishings, designer handbags, clothing, and a luxury motorcycle.” “Since SBA did not have an established strong internal control environment for approving and disbursing program funds, there was an insufficient barrier against fraudsters accessing funds that should have been available for eligible business owners adversely affected by the pandemic,” the OIG stated in the report, while also citing the “rush” by the agency to “swiftly disburse COVID-19 EIDL and PPP funds” for businesses in response to the pandemic.

A California man was sentenced on Monday to more than six years in prison for running an $8.75 million Ponzi scheme that hinged on a nonexistent factory that was supposed to create green energy out of cow manure, federal prosecutors said, the New York Times reported. For five years, Raymond Holcomb Brewer falsely claimed to be an engineer who ran a company that built anaerobic digestion plants, which convert manure into biogas, the United States attorney’s office for the Eastern District of California said in a statement on Monday. Mr. Brewer of Porterville, Calif., told his investors that he was building the plants and would generate millions of dollars in revenue by selling the biogas, the statement said. He told the investors that they would receive two-thirds of the profits, as well as tax incentives. “None of this was true,” Phillip A. Talbert, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of California, wrote in a sentencing memorandum. “Mr. Brewer did not begin construction on a single digester. He simply took his investors’ money and ran.” Brewer, who pleaded guilty to fraud charges in February, spent the money on a 3,700-square-foot custom home in California, a 12-acre plot of land in Montana and new Dodge Ram pickup trucks, federal prosecutors said.

In early February, federal prosecutors in Utah accused Zachary Bassett and Mason Warr of cheating the United States government out of millions of dollars. The accounting firm they operated had submitted more than 1,000 fraudulent tax forms to the Internal Revenue Service on behalf of businesses trying to claim pandemic-era stimulus funds, the prosecutors said, according to the New York Times. COS Accounting and Tax shut down later that month, leaving businesses and taxpayers that had paid the firm to help them claim federal money trying to figure out what had happened and why they were suddenly receiving audit notices from the I.R.S. Amid the onset of the pandemic in 2020, as large swaths of the economy went into lockdown, Washington set up various programs to help keep businesses and their workers afloat. Among them was the Employee Retention Credit, a tax benefit that was created as part of the initial $2 trillion pandemic relief legislation. The program offered businesses thousands of dollars per employee if they could show that COVID-19 was hurting their bottom lines and that they were continuing to pay workers. The money was intended to be a lifeline for struggling companies. Instead, it has become a magnet for fraud, creating a cottage industry of firms that market themselves as tax credit specialists who can help clients — even those who don’t actually qualify for the money — reap huge refunds from the I.R.S. Although the public health emergency is over, taxpayers can continue to apply for the tax credit until 2025. That has fueled a run for the money and the proliferation of financial service providers, who often charge hefty upfront fees or take cuts of around 25 percent of any tax refund.