Man Who Bought Tesla Stock With Covid Relief Funds Sentenced to 4 Years In Prison

An Oregon man is being hauled off to jail for 4 years after pulling off a reasonably elaborate rip-off, all within the title of Stonks. The Justice Department announced on Friday that it caught 51-year-old Andrew Lloyd swindling upwards of $3.4 million from a number of federal COVID-19 aid packages, after which utilizing that money to purchase 15,740 shares of Tesla shares final yr.

According to the DOJ’s announcement, Lloyd efficiently managed to rip-off a number of mortgage packages from the Small Business Administration (SBA), a federal department that has doled out upwards of $6 trillion to the mother-and-pop outlets that have been financially slammed throughout the pandemic. Coincidentally, the identical day that the DOJ made this announcement, the SBA’s inspector common discovered the company had doled out an estimated $3.6 billion in help to events that didn’t qualify for these funds.

Lloyd was clearly a type of guys that didn’t qualify, however the DOJ lays out how he was in a position to make off with the cash anyway. Starting in April 2020, he started submitting mortgage functions to the company utilizing “numerous business names and personally identification information of relatives and business associates without their consent.”

“Lloyd submitted false documentation to justify the loan amounts requested, including IRS forms listing the 2019 wages purportedly paid by entities controlled by Lloyd,” the announcement goes on. “The loan application packages included some of the same information across the different business entities, including the businesses’ physical locations and the names of several dozen employees. The IRS forms, the total amount of wages and earnings, the employee names, and the wages paid to each employee were all created by Lloyd and false.”

The proven fact that the feds didn’t catch on for greater than a yr despite the fact that this man used phony particulars a number of instances throughout a number of mortgage functions doesn’t, uh, paint the company in the most effective gentle. By the time he was caught, the announcement goes on, Lloyd had probably paid about $114 per Tesla share. Today, that value is more than $1,000. He’d additionally allegedly used the funds to purchase greater than 25 properties throughout Oregon and California, and to pour cash into different securities funds, too.

The DOJ says that after seizing one among Lloyd’s brokerage accounts early final yr, it discovered over $660,000 in securities and money. Today, these funds added with the 1000’s of Tesla shares put Lloyd’s complete ill-gotten earnings at a wholesome $18 million, no less than.

Of course, the majority of these funds gained’t be following him into jail. He pleaded responsible to fees of financial institution fraud, cash laundering, and aggravated identification theft this month, which landed him a four-year jail sentence with one other 5 years of supervised launch. Lloyd was additionally ordered to pay over $4 million in restitution, forfeit these 25 properties, and likewise forfeit greater than 15,000 of these Tesla shares.