California Man Tried to Steal $22 Million in COVID Relief Money
(The AEGIS Alliance) – CALIFORNIA – A California man who was convicted of fraud in 2015 tried to steal $22 million in coronavirus relief money, according to a press release by the Justice Department.
48-year-old Attila Colar who goes by several other names the feds said, applied for nine bogus loan claims. Only one out of nine claims went through, and Colar received around $1.1 million out of that $2 million loan request.
Colar filed for eight other claims that used the names of three bogus businesses. Colar claimed dozens of employees that didn’t exist. The other eight claims were all denied their approval.
Colar’s fraud attempts were particularly messy; a North Carolina “Game of Thrones” enthusiast received a $1.7 million loan for a bogus business called White Walker LLC before he also got busted.
An attorney for Colar said his client did not spend any of the $1.1 million and called it a “paper crime,” according to the Associated Press. The feds say Colar attempted to literally flush documents down the toilet at his San Francisco Bay Area home.
Colar spent five years in prison in 2015 for using fake documents to win security contracts with Alameda County, the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles, and the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.
He is not the first fraud suspect accused of defrauding the Paycheck Protection Program in the CARES Act. Everyone from ex-Jets wide receiver Josh Bellamy to an Atlanta reality TV star made attempts to fraudulently rake in some bailout money.
Attila Colar was released from police custody on a $100,000 bond and is expected to appear in court on October 27. However, Colar is a small fish in a big pond, and the big fish are getting away with billions of dollars in taxpayer money.
Kyle James Lee – The AEGIS Alliance – This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
