Carl Delano Torjagbo stole $13 million in COVID relief funds and false tax filing based on a fake overseas gold mining business with celebrities like Keanu Reeves among its 493 fictional employees. He also bought himself a Lamborghini Aventador, a BMW M850xi, and $15,000 worth of plastic surgery.

Torjagbo is serving a nearly 15-year prison sentence and has been ordered to pay $3.7 million in restitution. But a new analysis by Open the Books (OTB) suggests there are hundreds, maybe thousands, more Torjagbos out there who, to date, have gotten away with defrauding the federal government out of far more than the official government estimate of $300 billion lost in COVID relief programs like the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP).

Under both Presidents Donald Trump and his successor Joe Biden, “Congress authorized about $4.6 trillion in emergency COVID-19 relief between 2020 and 2021 for vulnerable businesses and struggling families, but fraud was identified in at least 19 different pandemic-relief programs, according to an April 2025 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report. If the government’s $300 billion fraud calculation is correct, then 6.5% of all pandemic aid was incorrectly distributed. What we have compiled is just a fraction of the hundreds of charged cases and undetected schemes,” OTB cautioned in its report.

Using the $300 billion official estimate, that works out to $2,260 for each of the 135 million U.S. households. In a previous report, however, OTB exposed $400 billion in fraud, so the total cost per household could be $3,013, according to the nonprofit government watchdog. If, as seems likely given the qualifications of the official estimates from GAO and other government sources, the actual total could approach $1 trillion, meaning the cost for every American household could approach $10,000.

The Small Business Administration (SBA) was a major focal point of federal assistance during the pandemic, and two of the biggest such programs included its PPP and the Economic Injury Disaster Loan (EIDL) operation. Both programs were frequent targets of fraudsters in the U.S. and overseas, including in Russia, China, Nigeria, and other countries. Between them, the two programs disbursed more than $1.2 trillion in tax-funded assistance.

The OTB analysis pointed to a report by SBA’s Inspector General (IG) who claimed 17% of all the PPP and EIDL spending, or approximately $200 billion, exhibited signs of fraudulent activity. The OTB analysis, however, reported that “an estimated $136 billion was stolen by criminals, con artists, and crime rings from around the world” — just from the PPP program.

A major obstacle to getting accurate numbers for the actual total lost to fraud at SBA is the agency’s weak oversight processes of the PPP and EIDL expenditures, according to GAO.

Similar losses to fraud were reported in the OTB analysis of the Department of Labor’s pandemic programs. “Congress created four new and temporary emergency unemployment insurance programs in the wake of the pandemic, including Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA), which extended benefits to gig workers and the self-employed. Open the Books found that unemployment aid was robbed of $200 billion. The Labor Department’s Office of Inspector General (DOLIG) estimated that at least $191 billion could have been improper payments, with a ‘significant portion’ attributable to fraud. The DOL estimated that 35.9% of PUA payments were improper, translating to $47 billion of its $131 billion,” the OTB report explained.

Another major problem in tracking fraudulent expenditures in federal COVID relief efforts is the fact that so many tax dollars were spent through multiple state governments and programs, the OTB report said. There were also major flaws in how the Department of the Treasury documented pandemic relief spending.

“The American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (ARPA) provided $350 billion in Coronavirus State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds (SLFRF), which still has millions left to divvy out. However, there is no single published estimate for total ARPA fraud specifically, and that gap is itself a documented oversight failure,” the OTB report said.

“ARPA was an umbrella law that funded many different programs administered by different agencies. Unlike single-agency programs with dedicated OIG oversight, such as PPP under the SBA or unemployment insurance under the DOL, ARPA’s $1.9 trillion flowed through dozens of programs across multiple agencies, meaning no watchdog has a unified fraud calculation,” the report continued.

“Take for example the Treasury Department. It established and modified its monitoring procedures, reviewing how SLFRF was spent, but it did not document those changes in key internal program guidance, creating a risk that the new procedures would not be implemented consistently,” according to the GAO. Treasury also did not issue timely management decisions on SLFRF findings in recipients’ single audit reports, meaning it did not have “reasonable assurance” that unallowable uses of funds were identified or remediated, leaving the fraud door wide open.”

Those problems were present at the Treasury Department during the Biden administration.

“There is still more COVID-19 fraud we have not mentioned: pandemic-related health care fraud (as Open the Books has documented in the Cost of Fraud series), stimulus checks paid out to dead people, and tax credits. One New Jerseyan sought more than $170 million in fraudulent COVID-19-related tax refunds, resulting in the largest COVID-19 tax relief fraud case to be tried in the country as of April this year,” the OTB analysis disclosed.