A man from Middletown, R.I., on federal supervised release and who was previously sentenced for robbing four banks faces charges in federal court in Providence for allegedly filing fraudulently seeking more than $4.7 million in forgivable loans from the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) that was created as part of the federal government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC) inspector general said in a release issued Thursday.
Court documents allege that Michael C. Moller, 41, applied for and received nearly $599,251 in PPP loans to pay employees for Fall River, Mass., businesses, none of which are incorporated with the Massachusetts Secretary of State or for which investigators could locate any tax or bank records, said the FDIC Office of Inspector General (OIG), which is assisting in the investigation. The fraudulent applications were filed in Moller’s name and in the names of his father and his girlfriend’s brother.
It’s also alleged that Moller, “alone or with family members and associates,” filed numerous fraudulent PPP loan applications in the name of his girlfriend’s son to pay employees of a Fall River-based business for which no records could be found by investigators. Among these applications were three nearly identical ones filed with different financial institutions, each seeking $734,300 in SBA guaranteed PPP loans. None of these applications resulted in the disbursement of PPP loans, the regulator said.
The agency said court records show Moller was convicted in the District of Massachusetts in 2010 for fraud and received a sentence of twenty-four months of supervised release. During that period, it said, Moller was convicted of four counts of bank robbery and sentenced to 108 months imprisonment and three years of supervised release. His term of supervised release is scheduled to terminate in July 2022.
RI Man Charged with Fraudulently Seeking $4.7 Million in Covid-19 Stimulus Loans