COVID-19 fraudster used stolen relief aid to purchase a private island in Florida

YANKEETOWN, Florida (AP) — A freshwater spring bubbles amid the mangroves, cabbage palms and red cedars on Sweetheart Island, a two-acre uninhabited patch of paradise purchased by Florida businessman Patrick Parker Walsh with stolen COVID-19 funds.

The island, located a mile off the coast of Gulf Coast town, Yankeetown, may have seemed like an ideal getaway for Walsh. Instead, he's serving five and half years in federal prison for stealing nearly $8 million in federal COVID-19 relief funds that he used, in part, to buy Sweetheart Island.

While Walsh's private island ranks among the more unusual purchases by pandemic fraudsters, his crime was not unique. He is one of thousands of thieves who perpetrated the greatest grift in US history. They potentially plundered more than $280 billion in federal COVID-19 aid; another $123 billion was wasted or misspent.

The loss represents close to 10 per cent of the $4.3 trillion the US government has disbursed to mitigate the economic devastation wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic, according to an analysis by The Associated Press.

An AP review of hundreds of pandemic fraud cases presents a picture of thieves and scam artists who spent lavishly on houses, luxury watches and diamond jewellery, Lamborghinis and other expensive cars.

The stolen aid also paid for long nights at strip clubs, gambling sprees in Las Vegas and bucket-list vacations.

Their crimes were relatively simple: The government's goal was to get cash into the hands of struggling people and businesses with minimal hassle, particularly during the early stages of the COVID-19 crisis.

Safeguards to weed out the swindlers were dropped. As Walsh's case and thousands of others have shown, stealing the money was as easy as lying on an application.

The thieves came from all walks of life and all corners of the globe. There was a Tennessee rapper who bragged about the ease of stealing more than $700,000 in pandemic unemployment insurance on YouTube.

A former pizzeria owner and host of a cryptocurrency-themed radio show bought an alpaca farm in Vermont with pilfered aid. And an ex-Nigerian government official who grabbed about half a million dollars in COVID-19 relief benefits was wearing a $10,000 watch and $35,000 gold chain when he was arrested.

Nearly 3,200 defendants have been charged with COVID-19 relief fraud, according to the US Justice Department. About $1.4 billion in stolen pandemic aid has been seized.

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