The company was called Kremkov Industries. It mined gold in Ghana, on paper. It had 493 employees, on paper. Keanu Reeves worked there, on paper. So did Gene Hackman, Charlie Brown, Nancy Drew, John Snow, and Emilia Clarke. None of them ever collected a paycheck, because none of them ever set foot in Marietta, Georgia, and several of them do not exist at all.

The paper was enough. In 2020 the government was shoveling money out the door to keep the country alive, and the shovel did not stop to check names. Carl Delano Torjagbo signed for a $9.6 million Paycheck Protection loan on the strength of his imaginary payroll, then filed tax returns claiming losses at his imaginary mine, and the IRS mailed him another $3.4 million. He bought a mansion. He bought a 2014 Lamborghini Aventador, a BMW M850xi, a Range Rover. He put $51,000 down on a 72-foot yacht. He spent more than $15,000 on plastic surgery, which is the one purchase that suggests he knew someone would eventually come looking for his face.

Someone did. He is in federal prison now, sentenced to nearly 15 years. That is the good news, and it is nearly all of it. The government says pandemic programs lost roughly $300 billion to fraud. It has recovered $1.4 billion. That is 0.47%. Your household's share of the theft is about $2,260. Your household's share of the recovery is $10.55. Hold both numbers. This issue is about the distance between them.

The Purse Was Emptied on the Table

Start with the size of the purse. Between 2020 and 2021, Congress authorized about $4.6 trillion in emergency pandemic relief. It went out fast, through at least 19 different programs, and speed was the point. Speed was also the door. The Government Accountability Office puts the fraud at around $300 billion. OpenTheBooks, which has tracked this money since the first check cleared, puts it at $400 billion. Even the low number means 6.5% of everything spent to save families and businesses went to thieves. Per household, that is $2,260 at the government's count and $3,013 at the higher one. You paid it either way.

The small business programs took the worst of it. PPP and EIDL moved over $1.2 trillion, and the SBA's own inspector general flagged 17% of it, about $200 billion, as potentially fraudulent. 86% of that fraud walked out the door in 2020, the rushed year, the year of the shovel. Unemployment insurance lost somewhere between $100 billion and $135 billion by the GAO's count, and here is the detail that should keep an auditor up at night: two federal watchdogs studying the same programs in the same year produced estimates $30 billion apart. The American Rescue Plan is worse still. Its $1.9 trillion flowed through dozens of programs across many agencies, and no single watchdog was ever assigned to add up the fraud. The total is unknown because the machinery to know it was never built. You cannot audit what you never counted, and nobody counted.

Now the recovery. The COVID-19 Fraud Enforcement Task Force has charged more than 3,500 defendants and filed more than 400 civil suits. Good people did that work. I know some of them. But the money seized or forfeited stands at $1.4 billion, a figure the DOJ has not updated since April 2024. Against $300 billion stolen, that is 0.47%, the $10.55 per household from the cold open. And by a House Oversight estimate, at least half the stolen relief left the country entirely, into the hands of Russian, Chinese, and Nigerian crime rings. That money is not coming back. It never comes back. Once cash leaves the public purse it obeys the one law Congress cannot amend: gone is gone.

I have a personal stake in this ledger. Extending the statute of limitations to 10 years on PPP and EIDL fraud was a fight I worked, and in 2022 we won it. Congress moved in 2025 to give unemployment fraud cases the same runway. The clock now runs to 2030, and the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee has $88 million to keep hunting through 2034. That was the right fight. It was also not enough, and the numbers say so out loud. A longer clock does not build case files. Investigators build case files, there are not enough of them, and the yachts are already in the water.

39 Trillion Reasons to Tell Yourself a Story

Now widen the lens, because the stolen $300 billion did not vanish into a ledger line. It sits inside the national debt, and the debt crossed $39 trillion in March. That is nearly double the $19.9 trillion on the books in January 2017, 10 years after the Trump campaign promise to erase the whole thing in eight. The interest alone will pass $1 trillion this fiscal year, roughly triple what it was in 2020, and the Peterson Foundation puts the coming decade's interest tab at about $47,000 per person. Read that carefully: the fraud rode out on borrowed money, so you pay for the Lamborghini twice. Once when the loan was approved, and again every year, in interest, forever.

9 in 10 Americans now say the debt is driving up their cost of living. Whatever an economist makes of that, a fraud investigator knows exactly what it is: pressure, applied to 130 million kitchen tables at once. OpenTheBooks wrote in Newsweek that far too often Congress chooses to "simply empty the purse on the table and let everyone pick through the loot." That sentence is the whole crime scene. When the people who hold the purse treat it that way at the top, the triangle closes at the bottom. The pressure is the grocery bill. The opening is the next rushed program. The story writes itself, and it is being written for millions of people right now, by their own government's example.

The lesson for the next emergency is not complicated, add identity verification on the front end, even at added cost, because once the money leaves the coffers it is nearly impossible to recover. 0.47% is not a recovery rate. It is a tuition bill for a lesson we had better only pay for once.

The Edge, Sold From Inside the House

And if you want to see the License of Hard Times operating at the very top, look at what surfaced Thursday. Gabriel Perez has run the president's teleprompter since 2016. Trump praised him by name at a rally: "a good one is really like gold." A deputy assistant to the president, $175,000 a year, trusted with the words before the country heard them. According to federal investigators, he decided the scroll was a stock ticker.

Kalshi, the prediction market, runs "mention markets" where traders bet on whether the president will say a given word or phrase in a speech. Some traders install TV antennas to shave a fraction of a second off the broadcast delay. Perez did not need an antenna. He had the script. The CFTC says he bet on more than 12 speeches over 3 months, a December primetime address, Davos in January, a Medal of Honor ceremony in March, and made nearly $100,000 doing it. Kalshi's surveillance flagged the pattern, froze about $90,000 of it, banned him, and called the regulator. He is negotiating a settlement now, and he no longer works at the White House. The White House had, by the way, circulated a memo in March telling staff that betting on inside information was a crime. He is alleged to have kept betting.

He is not alone, and that is the point. An Army special forces soldier charged with making $400,000 on Polymarket betting on the Maduro raid before it happened. A Google engineer charged over $1.2 million made betting on his own company's confidential search data. George Santos, under investigation for pumping a Kalshi market on whether he would attend the State of the Union, then cashing the "no" when he skipped it. None of these men were starving. They had salaries, clearances, access. What they had most of all was the story: everyone near the money takes a taste, so why not me. When the edge is being sold from inside the White House itself, do not be surprised at what people conclude at the kitchen table. And when a stranger offers to sell that same edge to you, remember that Perez had the real thing and still lost it all to one flagged pattern. The man selling you an edge has no edge. He has you.

Field Manual

6 controls for hard-times fraud. Stress season is hunting season. Here is how not to be the game.